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Workers Vanguard No. 1150 |
8 March 2019
The closing date for news in this issue is 5 March.
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Oakland Teacher Anger Over Strike Settlement Free, Quality Public Education for All! MARCH 4—The seven-day strike by 3,000 teachers, nurses and other school staff of the Oakland Education Association (OEA) ended today with a settlement that was opposed by 42 percent of the union members who voted. At a heated union meeting on March 3 attended by over 1,000 OEA members, the bargaining committee was heckled and the proposed contract denounced. The OEA leadership claimed the settlement with the union-busting Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) was a “historic contract.” But many teachers, nurses and others who had stood solid throughout the strike weren’t buying it. No wonder. The much-vaunted wage increase won’t even keep pace with inflation in a city where teachers already can’t afford to live; class sizes were reduced by a token one or at most two students; little to nothing was granted to relieve onerous caseloads of school counselors and nurses.
A letter signed by more than 200 OEA members pointed out that the settlement “includes nothing concrete to address school closures, allowing the School Board to push through its plans to close 24 more schools and opening the door for the continued privatization of Oakland education.” A key demand of the strike was an end to school closures, which currently threaten almost a third of Oakland public schools, mainly in black and Latino neighborhoods. Instead, the OEA leadership settled for a meaningless promise of a five-month moratorium on school closures, i.e., simply putting it off until August. As for the privately run charter schools, which already claim almost 30 percent of Oakland students, the agreement calls on the school board to request a moratorium on new charters from California’s Democratic Party governor, Gavin Newsom.
In a school district whose students are 89 percent Latino, black, Asian and other minority, many working-class and poor parents actively sympathized with the OEA strike. Despite the district’s efforts to intimidate parents and teachers, 97 percent of students stayed away, a number of them joining the picket lines. The Service Employees International Union Local 1021, which organizes clerical, paraprofessionals and other school employees, went out in solidarity for the duration of the strike. (read on)
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The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) is a proletarian, revolutionary and internationalist tendency committed to the task of building Leninist parties as national sections of a democratic-centralist international. Our aim is the achievement of new October Revolutions—nothing else, nothing other, nothing less. The ICL bases itself on Marxist historical, dialectical materialism and seeks in particular to carry forward the international working-class perspectives of Marxism developed in the theory and practice of the Bolshevik leaders V. I. Lenin and L. D. Trotsky and embodied in the decisions of the first four Congresses of the Communist International as well as key documents of the Fourth International such as the Transitional Program (1938) and "War and the Fourth International" (1934). We also look to James P. Cannon, a leader of the early American Communist Party who was won to Trotskyism and went on to become a principal founder of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), working in close collaboration with Leon Trotsky. The origins of the ICL are in the Spartacist League/U.S., which began as the Revolutionary Tendency in the SWP and was bureaucratically expelled in 1963. Our ICL "Declaration of Principles and Some Elements of Program" was modeled on the Declaration of Principles adopted at the 1966 founding conference of the SL/U.S.
