Oklahoma strike enters fourth day

[ckaihatsu]

“We need to stop putting profits above pupils”

As Oklahoma strike enters fourth day, students speak out in support of teachers

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/04/05/okla-a05.html


This is a very encouraging development, a follow-up to this recent labor action:


West Virginia teachers strike -- still going!

https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/200218-West-Virginia-teachers-strike-still-going!

[TheRightfulEmperor]

I fully support the teacher's strike, but is it possible there is a better way to strike.

In the Libcom organization handboook, it talked about a hospital in France that was worried patients would go untreated if they went on a strike. To fix this, they refused to file the bills for the medical care, effectively cutting the income in half. This of course, helped the consumer, while hurting the administration.

Could this in some way be applied to the teacher's strike? Would there be some way to help the consumer(the student), while still hurting the administration?

Any ideas?

- - - Updated - - -

I feel that this may not concern the capitalists as much as we want it to.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Well college instructors often hold classes at the picket line. School teachers frequently do “work to rule” as protest, where they stop doing all the “free work” that teachers regularly do. But in this context that “hurts the students” anyway because teachers have to work off the books and do other things like that to prep classes.

In these strikes students have come to support and some teachers have held classes at the protests - though logistically it would be difficult for all teachers to teach all students because they are minors so it would depend on 100% parent support. Not to mention, schools are paid by the pupil from state agencies, not parents - so there would be no way to pass on the bill.

I get where you are coming from. Strikes where the people impacted by the halting of a service are other working class people need to win broad class support and solidarity. But I think the way to do that on a large scale is to not apologize for the work stoppage but to make the teacher demands linked to community demands - to say that the schools continuing to function in a status quo way with dwindling resources and budgets would be a daily detriment to the students and working class communities as a whole. This has the potential to tap into the general populist impulse while cutting against the right-wing populism that has claimed that space with a distinctly working class based populism. That some of the strikes have done this to some extent is part of the reason they’ve been relatively powerful.

As the anti-revisionist wisdom of Star Wars Rebel Thought teaches us: we won’t win by destroying the things we hate (the bourgeoise) we win by saving the things we love (mobilizing our class).

[TheRightfulEmperor]

Of course, the problem may also effect lower-class families who rely on the free lunches, as well as time to get to work, instead of watching their kids.