Photo: “LWSD One-Day Walkout” by David Schott is licensed under CC BY 2.0 / Desaturated from original and resized
By Alice McIntyre
Over the last year, public school teachers throughout the country have had a strike wave, with teachers’ unions taking to the picket lines coast to coast. A total of nearly 300,000 teachers took action in a series of statewide strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona, as well as smaller strikes in Colorado, North Carolina, and Kentucky, according to a Feb. 14 article by Andrew Van Dam in The Washington Post.
When teachers went on strike early this year in Los Angeles, efforts were made to mobilize other unions to support the teachers on the picket lines. Groups like ATU Local 1277, representing LA transit workers and the California Faculty Association, representing educators at California State University, passed motions of solidarity with the striking teachers. CBS Los Angeles reported that mid-day rallies by the LA teachers had brought tens of thousands into the streets in support. The strike lasted six days until an agreement was reached. The agreement, though, was subsequently criticized by rank-and-file teachers and groups like Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW), who dubbed it a “shameful sellout” in a Jan. 24 post on their website.
According to the CSEW, the union leadership instructed striking teachers not to stop strikebreakers from crossing picket lines, in what can accurately be called a betrayal of the labor principle of “picket lines mean don’t cross.” Despite much of the rank-and-file’s criticism of the agreement and of the union leadership, the strike points to the power of large mobilizations shutting down streets and schools in the fight for certain demands.
At the City University of New York (CUNY), some adjunct professors came together and organized the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), which represents CUNY faculty and part of its staff. PSC are engaged in a “7K or Strike” campaign, demanding that the minimum pay per course be raised to $7000. Adjuncts compose well over half of CUNY faculty and do the majority of teaching at its various campuses, according to a Mar. 15 article by Steve Wishnia for LaborPress. CUNY has a “multi-tier” labor system in which various groups of employees (even those performing practically the same job) receive lower pay and less benefits than others, as detailed in a bulletin by CUNY Contingents Unite (CCU), a grouping within the PSC. This allows the university to engage in what is described by CCU as a “divide-and-conquer” labor strategy, pitting groups of university workers (dubbed “contingents”) against one another.
Additionally, New York State’s “Taylor Law” prevents public employees from striking, which includes workers at CUNY. Unions thus face an uphill battle at the 26-campus, 274,000-student university. Posters in support of “7K or Strike” were banned at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice earlier this year, but in spite of this the John Jay chapter of the PSC voted to pass a resolution endorsing the demand.
Divisions have also emerged in the fight for “7K”. Several groups within the movement boycotted an organizing conference in March due to the imposition of a ban on leftist literature, which they saw as a violation of democracy in the labor movement. One group, Trabajadores Internacionales Clasistas, wrote a letter to the conference organizers on Feb. 10 denouncing the literature ban. This letter came following a previous letter of condemnation from Feb. 5 by another group of concerned activists, both of which were published in the bulletin from CCU. It remains to be seen what will come out of the movement around “7K,” and whether or not the adjunct fight will draw in other university workers into a broader struggle.
Struggles by students and education workers throughout the country place the current austerity issues at Evergreen in the context of a widespread attack on education. The Evergreen State College is currently facing an enrollment crisis attributable to the 2017 media frenzy which demonized the college and brought far-right groups such as Patriot Prayer to campus.
A 2018 article by Abby Spegman in The Olympian reported that the administration’s budget cuts reached a total of nearly six million dollars during the 2018-19 school year. A second 2018 article by the editorial board of The Olympian reported faculty and staff layoffs, as well as student fee increases. It has also been brought to light that budget cuts have been concurrent with several potential OSHA violations, in addition to the arming of campus police with AR-15s and the purchase by Police Services of three cameras disguised as smoke detectors and outlet plugs, as previously reported in The Cooper Point Journal.
The concurrent cuts and “security measures” were not taken idly. Evergreen students in the South Sound General Education Union of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW-GEU) have made their voices heard through numerous protests and direct actions starting in Fall 2018. The IWW-GEU released a demand letter on Nov. 7 of 2018 criticizing Evergreen’s administration and their decision to make budget cuts in art and political economy programs. The letter also criticizes the administration’s plan to hire a new campus police officer. Later, on May 8, 2019 the IWW-GEU issued another demand letter calling for a 50% cut of George Bridges’ salary, the re-opening of the campus pool, and more.
When asked for a statement, the IWW-GEU expressed their concerns about liberal arts funding, saying:
“We believe that pressure and organization of the working class on campus—be it students, faculty, and staff united[sic]—is the only hope toward proper allocation of school resources, for that will cause proper democratic processes for decisions regarding how the school will function. Our stance is that the school should not hire any more police, and instead focus its resources on funding the arts such as theater and photography as well as programs that study society such as political economy.”
The IWW-GEU holds this stance because “…the Evergreen State College is a liberal arts college whose identity is grounded and defined in its alternative, experimental, student-directed approach to education.”
Throughout the country, institutions of higher education have been subject to policies set by campus administrators that do not seek to benefit them. Organized efforts to combat said policies are underway at several universities, and in the educational sector as a whole. However, Evergreen’s IWW-GEU campaign has notably been dominated by students, and drawn in a lower level of support from faculty, staff, and other campus workers. In addition, there has not been any joint action between the IWW-GEU and existing campus unions. What is certain is that without a continued, collective fightback, the steady flow of administrative austerity at Evergreen is sure to continue. Teacher strikes and organizing against adjunct poverty at other campuses hold lessons for those at Evergreen who oppose policies which harm students, faculty, and staff.
Correction: In an earlier version of this article, the phrase “sects of the group” was used in reference to the boycott of a 7K or Strike organizing conference by Trabajadores Internacionales Clasistas and others. This wording was changed to “groups within the movement,” in order to clarify that the 7K struggle is a broader campaign within the Professional Staff Congress at the City University of New York, not a specific organization.
