Thursday, January 10, 2019

TEACHERS' STRIKE SPREADS ACROSS AMERICA - IS THIS THE MARCH TO REVOLUTION?

“All the teachers across the nation should come out”

California, Michigan educators call for joint action with LA teachers

By our reporters 
10 January 2019
School workers, teachers and students throughout the US support the demands of Los Angeles teachers for decent pay and benefits and for a massive infusion of funding to adequately educate children. Several teachers and support staff members spoke to the WSWS Teacher Newsletter.
A secondary social science teacher, Anne, said, “I am a teacher in Sweetwater Unified High School District, the second largest secondary school district in California next to Los Angeles Unified School District [LAUSD]. We face similar conditions to those of the LA Unified teachers and, in fact, are in the midst of a massive budget deficit and mismanagement already significantly affecting the lives of workers and students.
“This is also a scenario that is nothing new to the public schools across the country. As teachers, we are a workforce that experiences on a daily basis the immense economic crisis in this country—the effects of poverty, homelessness, violence, hunger in the lives of many of our students and the difficulty of making ends meet on our own.
“The LA teachers’ strike represents the truly significant and continued frustration of workers and students within public schools. We cannot look to help from above, as both the Republican and Democratic parties, with the tireless aid of the unions, have shown for decades that their policies on education will continue to betray working class people and worsen the conditions within public schools. I fully support teachers striking in LA and encourage all workers within public education and beyond to join in this fight.”
Los Angeles teachers demonstration
Maria has been a food service worker in the Santa Ana Unified School District for 19 years. “I definitely support the Los Angeles teachers. We’re going through the same things here. The district doesn’t give us any more benefits. Our pay doesn’t meet our living costs.
“Food service workers are the lowest-paid workers in the district. With cost of living so high, a 1 percent raise, a 2 percent raise, even 5 percent raise is nothing. I’m going to the credit union today to apply for a loan because I can’t afford my bills. We are doing more work with less staffing. It’s the same here as in LA.
“The district is putting more and more pressure on everybody. We work 6-1/2 hours a day, nine months a year. Recently, we were reclassified as salaried, and the Service Employees International Union [SEIU] didn’t even tell us. It was done without us knowing. That doesn’t mean we get more money. In fact, we’re getting less. When we clean up after the kids, we still have to finish even though it might take longer. And there’s no extra pay because we’re ‘salaried.’
“In my nearly 20 years, I’ve had three injuries, mostly from negligence on the district’s part. The first one was when the pallets were stacked so high that one of them fell on my shoulder. I had to have surgery. My second injury was in my ankle. I suspect the custodians were in a rush that day and trying to do their job, but one of them forgot to screw in a drain screen on the floor. So, I fell into the drain.
Maria
“I told my union president, ‘How would you like it if we were to go on strike and I’d tell the media we were on strike not because we can’t do our jobs safely but because you’re not doing your job?’ He just smirked. I told him, ‘How dare you smirk at us!’ So many of us have injuries. You wouldn’t think that people who work serving food to kids would get hurt. But the way they try to speed us up, it’s like we’re on a conveyor line.
“If you call your union rep to defend you, you’ll see them having coffee or going out to eat with management. We need people who are going to work for you, not against you. We’ve seen it so many times, and it’s a shame.
“I’m a member of SEIU. I used to pay dues of $30 a month. Then it went up to $40. Why do we pay for a union? It’s supposed to work for us, but they don’t.
“I think we should all go on strike together with the LA teachers. We’re all facing the same thing.”
Daniel teaches in San Diego and wanted to speak directly to educators in Los Angeles, “I am right next door to you guys, and I support your strike 100 percent. I have been teaching history for five years. Just like your students, we have many homeless students, others who live in poverty and come from migrant families. We face the same problems.
“Our unions down here have played a supporting role in our district’s corrupt actions. Our district leaders have been found so corrupt, the state might take over this year. And this whole time our union was happily backing them, feigning ignorance. Our local union president is even [self-described as] ‘good friends’ with the district board. We have had teachers from the San Ysidro district, San Diego Unified District and even the elementary school district fight their battles alone, despite that some of these schools are right next to each other. Our unions said nothing about a joint strike to support any of them.
“Every month, I receive the NEA [National Education Association] monthly magazine with articles about Democratic candidates, about equity and about inclusiveness. Nothing is mentioned about the efforts of both Democrats and Republicans to privatize public education. The union also doesn’t say anything about getting rid of ICE in our neighborhoods, or building a struggle against the military recruitment of our students.
“I’d welcome a delegation of Los Angeles teachers to come to our schools and build a joint struggle. Many of our teachers speak Spanish as well, it’s within our reach to even contact teachers of the whole US, Mexico and Latin America to help meet our demands.”
“Marjorie,” a veteran of the 2015-2016 Detroit teacher wildcat strikes in the form of “sickouts,” also spoke to the WSWS Teacher Newsletter. She asked that a pseudonym be used to protect her job.
“I know Detroit teachers and workers will welcome a strike in Los Angeles. I have been following its development. LA teachers are tired too. The same thing that happened to us is happening to them. The lesson of the Detroit sickouts is that if you stick together, you can get things done, but we can’t depend on the unions. Teachers know that, they say it all the time now.”
Detroit teachers protesting in 2016
The Detroit sickouts were an escalating series of independent job actions coordinated by teachers on social media in defiance of the Detroit Federation of Teachers (DFT). The actions gripped the Detroit Public Schools for more than eight months between 2015 and 2016 and were a precursor of the 2018 teacher rebellion. The sickouts were called to oppose crumbling and unsafe school buildings as well as years of takeaway contracts imposed by the union. In the end, the DFT, with the aid of American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and staff, forced through a rotten deal. The 175-year-old district was shut down, rescuing Wall Street bondholders at the expense of the schools, teachers and students, and replaced by a new Detroit Public Schools Community District in 2016.
“LA teachers need to figure out a way to fight for themselves,” Marjorie said. “The lesson of the strikes throughout 2018 is that we have to join with other workers. We have to create our own political movement. We can’t wait for the unions or the Democrats or Republicans to save us.”
Noting that Detroit is controlled by Democrats like Los Angeles, Marjorie said, “There is no difference between Democrats and Republicans. In Michigan, the emergency managers [placed in charge of the Detroit Public Schools for decades, imposing terrible inroads on teachers’ living standards and deliberately de-funding the schools] were begun under [Democratic Governor] Jennifer Granholm.”
Asked what should be done, Marjorie stated, “All teachers need to come out together across the nation. Charter school teachers, too. They’re not our enemies, they are exploited workers too. We need to all be out in force. The people in this country don’t want privatization; they don’t want Bill Gates running our educational system. Who is he? These oligarchs already control just about everything, education is one of the last things left.”
Turning to the situation in Detroit, the veteran educator commented that things today are worse than they were before the sickouts. “Things are horrible. They are throwing more and more tests in. We’re not told, they just appear. In October, one was announced and there was a pretest. Then, during the holiday, we get a robocall that today, when we return to school, there will be a post-test. We are urged to get our kids to take it because the test will count for 40 to 50 percent of our evaluations! This is constant.
“We literally have no time to teach because of all the testing. The union is not doing anything. The superintendent lies. Meanwhile, we have 60 percent of our kids who are ‘resource students’ [special needs] and we are told we must get a 50 percent improvement. They are forced to take the ACT, the SAT and we are responsible for their scores. It’s unfair to the kids, and it’s unfair to us teachers.”
Asked about the privatization scheme being advanced in Los Angeles under the nomenclature “portfolio schools,” Marjorie said, “Yes, we’re now getting A-F grading in Detroit. We are lumped in with the charter schools. The kids are asked to do surveys on us, to grade us, for this purpose. Privatization is a nationwide problem. The capitalists want to profit from education, and they don’t care who they demonize in order to do it. Capitalism has outlived itself.”

THIS IS A STATE UNDER LA RAZA SUPREMACY MEXICAN OCCUPATION.

“Almost everyone I know is working two jobs to make ends meet”.... THIS IS THE SAME COUNTY THAT HANDS OUT A BILLION PER YEAR FOR MEXICO'S ANCHOR BABY BREEDERS!



"Los Angeles and California teachers should be warned. Beutner and a whole host of figures will accept no obstacles in their drive to privatize the district and cut teachers wages and benefits."

Los Angeles teachers prepare for strike

More than 33,000 teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District are set to strike Thursday in what would be the largest walkout by educators in the US since last year’s statewide strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona. Like the previous struggles, the battle in the nation’s second largest school district centers on the fight by educators against the assault by both the Democratic and Republican parties on the right to public education.
Teachers are demanding pay raises, smaller class sizes and increased funding to hire more nurses, librarians, counselors and other critical support staff. They are also opposing the school authorities’ use of standardized tests to scapegoat teachers for educational problems caused by the defunding of education and the deterioration of social conditions. In Los Angeles, as in other school districts, the shutting down of “failing schools” has been used as the justification for a vast expansion of for-profit charter schools, which siphon off an estimated $600 million from LA public schools each year.
While last year’s statewide strikes largely pitted educators against Republican-led state governments, in Los Angeles teachers are fighting directly against the Democratic Party, which controls the school district and the local government, holds the governor’s seat, and wields a super-majority in both houses of the state legislature.
Students and teachers march in downtown LA last month
While the teachers’ unions in California and 

nationally have falsely promoted the 

Democrats as allies of teachers and 

defenders of public education, the Democratic

Party has proven to be just as ruthless an 

enemy as the Republican Party. Decades of 

bipartisan funding cuts have reduced 

California schools, once known as the best in 

the nation, to 43rd in the US in per-pupil 

spending.
The state is expecting a $15 billion budget surplus, but the new governor, Democrat Gavin Newsom, has declared that any proposals for increased K-12 school funding will have to be “whittled down” because “we all” have to “live within in our means.” After a meeting with state Democrats, he told the Sacramento Bee last month, “We’re not going to deviate from being fiscally prudent”—a reference to his predecessor Jerry Brown’s austerity measures.
Yet both corporate-controlled parties have 

showered Silicon Valley and the 

entertainment and finance industries with 

endless tax cuts. California is home to the 

largest number of billionaires—144—in the 

nation.
The school district, headed by the multi-millionaire former investment banker Austin Beutner, has refused to budge. It is demanding that the paltry three percent raise it is offering be contingent on cutting the health care benefits of future teachers. School officials are also rejecting out-of-hand the teachers’ demands for increased school funding and hiring, and a curtailment of charter schools.
An article in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times (Beutner is the newspaper’s former publisher and CEO), complained that teachers are demanding “more control over how money is spent at schools, how much time is given over to standardized testing and how space on district campuses is allocated to charter schools.” The article continued: “District officials question whether such demands are proper bargaining topics and oppose them almost universally as interfering with their management of the school system.”
Beutner got his start in the privatization of public assets when he was tapped by the Clinton administration to head the State Department’s collaboration in the dismantling of state-owned property in the Soviet Union and its sell-off to criminal asset strippers. Backed by powerful corporate interests pushing for more for-profit charter schools, Beutner, a Democrat and former deputy mayor of Los Angeles, hopes to inflict a devastating defeat on the teachers and accelerate the privatization of public education.
In the face of this all-out assault, the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), which is affiliated with both national teacher unions—the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)—has kept teachers on the job without a new contract for a year-and-a-half, including months of state mediation and fact-finding. In so doing, the union ignored a near unanimous strike mandate by rank-and-file teachers.
In a last-ditch effort to prevent a walkout, UTLA officials are meeting with school authorities on Monday. In a L os Angeles Times op-ed piece Sunday, UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl wrote: “We will engage in whatever talks are possible before Jan. 10 to avert a strike. But for talks to be successful, the district needs to commit to improve public schools.” This vague formula appears to invite the district to offer some cosmetic change in its position in order to block a strike.
If the UTLA is unable to prevent a strike, it plans to follow the pattern of the NEA and AFT in 2018 in West Virginia and other states where the unions worked to isolate the teachers and then cut deals with the political establishment that abandoned educators’ demands for substantial improvements in pay and school funding. The unions did everything they could to prevent the spread of strikes across the US and prevent the movement of educators from developing into a political confrontation with the Democratic Party.
Instead, they sought to channel the opposition of the teachers behind the campaign of the Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections under the banner of “Remembers in November.” The outright treachery of this policy is already becoming evident to the teachers in LA.
In his comment in the Times, Caputo-Pearl tried to boost illusions that teachers could achieve their aims by lobbying for increased funding from the Democrats in the state capital in Sacramento. The UTLA president also promoted a Democratic-backed initiative on the 2020 ballot that includes a modest increase in capital gains taxes.
The unions peddled the same illusions and lies last year in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona, with the result that none of the supposed funding guarantees have been honored and no significant increase in school funding has occurred.
A court ruling by a federal judge over the weekend, which denied the district’s efforts to compel special education teachers to work during a strike, indicates that the state is looking to the union to quickly shut down a walkout before it can escalate into a broader movement of teachers and the working class more generally.
But that is exactly what is needed. If the LA teachers are to mount a serious fight, they must take the conduct of the struggle into their own hands through the formation of rank-and-file action committees in every school and community. These committees must formulate their own demands, including a 30 percent increase in wages, the reconversion of all charter schools to public schools and a vast increase in funding.
To conduct this fight, LA teachers must join their struggle with that of educators in Oakland and other school districts and fight for a statewide strike to defend the right to high quality public education. The fight of teachers must be linked to broader sections of workers as part of an assault on the fortunes of the super-rich and the fight for a radical redistribution of wealth to meet social needs.
Los Angeles educators who spoke to the WSWS Teacher Newsletterexpressed their determination to fight. Lamisha, a school counselor in her fifth year with the district, said, “I travel to an elementary school one day, a middle school another day, and a high school another day, and so on. Things are getting worse because of the social crisis, and we have no support.
“Everything is on a minimum level for maximum problems. We need more counselors who can work with kids with anger management and other problems. If a child is homeless, they’re experiencing trauma. How can they learn? We need to get to the root of the problems, and no one’s tackling that one.”
“The teachers have got to speak out now,” Barbara, a special education assistant since 1999, told the WSWS. “Almost everybody I know is working two jobs to make ends meet. The three percent they’re offering the teachers is nothing. It used to be that you’d automatically get a three percent raise, like a cost-of-living raise. Then you’d get a real raise on top of that. Even people working at In ‘n Out and McDonalds are getting better raises.”
Barbara, who is member of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 99, added, “Our union has thrown us under the bus. We were told that if we attended the training in June, we would get an additional five percent in pay. That never happened. Our contract was violated. I don’t understand why we can’t go out in support of the teachers. All my local said we’re going to do is wear red. That’s all.”
“I have been teaching for over 25 years and every year teachers have been mandated to do more with less,” an LA teacher posted in the comment section of a local news outlet. “The evidence is in my classroom and in the school. The school grounds are unkempt, as you can see scuff marks, trash across the campus, dirty restrooms, dusty windows, because the district has downsized custodial staff. My kindergarten students and I sweep the room and pretend to ‘ice skate’ with baby wipes while listening to music to mop the room.
“Our library is neglected because we only have a librarian every other week and the library is closed the week she is not there. There are less resources and teachers are treated like children. We have to justify why we need a learning tool or why we need certain books to meet students’ needs. Many of us either swallow the cost and buy what we need or we just make do with what we have—which is not enough.
“Sometimes I think it’s a miracle I still try to engage my students despite all the obstacles I encounter every day. I enjoy teaching my students and I value them. That’s why I think the course we’re on as a district is not sustainable. I cannot continue to subsidize my students’ education and it’s getting harder and harder for me and my colleagues to pretend that everything is okay. It’s not. That’s why I’m willing to strike—so that my students and I get the respect we deserve.”

Austin Beutner—Wall Street’s Superintendent of Education in Los Angeles

Less than a year ago, on May 1, 2018, the Los Angeles Board of education selected Austin Beutner, a former investment banker, as the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). Beutner’s appointment was made shortly after the most expensive school board election in US history in which millions were spent to elect candidates favorable to the billionaire-led school privatization movement.
LAUSD is the nation’s second largest school district with more than 600,000 students and whose 33,000 teachers are expected to strike on January 10.
Beutner began his career as a financial analysist for Smith Barney, a wealth management firm. At the age of 29 he became the youngest partner at the Blackstone Group, one of the largest private equity firms in the world.
At the age of 33, in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he was selected by President Bill Clinton to lead a US State Department team in Russia on behalf of Wall Street to assist in monetizing many of the public assets stolen by the future Russian oligarchs.
In 1996, after his success in plundering Russian assets on behalf of Wall Street investors, Beutner co-founded with former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, Roger Altman, Evercore Partners, an investment banking advisory firm. When Evercore went public in 2006, the initial public offering reportedly made Beutner more than $100 million.
Around this time, Beutner became a Los Angeles resident and with his large bankroll became a magnet for local politicians.
In 2010, he was appointed by Democratic Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to be First Deputy Mayor of Los Angeles with oversight over twelve city agencies and 17,000 city employees.
As Deputy Mayor Beutner focused on making the city more “business-friendly,” dispensing with many “unnecessary” permits and regulations.
In this role, not only did he earn the gratitude of local businesses but the local trade union bureaucracy as well.
“When I first heard of his appointment and that he had this Wall Street background and a lot of money, I was skeptical,” said Maria Elena Durazo, head of the Los Angeles AFL-CIO. She came to change her mind however. “I’m so used to hearing why something can’t be done or why it’s going to take so long. With Beutner it’s the opposite. He just gets it done.”
In 2013 with Villaraigosa’s term expiring, Beutner launched a campaign to run for Mayor but dropped out of the race a year later after attracting only two percent of likely voters.
Later in 2013, Beutner and former US Secretary of Commerce and Democratic operative Mickey Kantor co-chaired the “2020 Los Angeles Commission” to study and report on the financial problems impacting Los Angeles, particularly its chronic budget deficits and underfunded pension liabilities.
The report issued by this Commission emphasized the “failure” of the public education system and the need to assert more autocratic control. “Bold steps need to be taken, starting with a hard look at where accountability lies for our public education system. Our current approach is not acceptable—a part-time, elected school board (elected by less than 20% of adults in our community) overseeing a $7+ billion enterprise does not make sense.”
The report implicitly suggested that the LAUSD might fare better under mayoral control, an effort that former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa tried, and failed to achieve. Characterizing LA Unified’s current governance structure as “prone to crisis, turnover and inconsistency,” the report notes that other cities have made more assertive efforts to control their public-school systems.
Also in 2013, Beutner joined with billionaire Eli Broad in an unsuccessful attempt to purchase the Los Angeles Times. In 2014, however, he was successful in becoming publisher and CEO of the Los Angeles Times, but was fired in September 2015. Before his takeover, the Times posted the teacher-rating scores of 6,000 LA teachers based on student test results. Rigoberto Ruelas, a fifth-grade teacher at Miramonte Elementary in South LA, committed suicide after his family said he became depressed over the “less effective” rating posted on the newspaper’s web site.
Within two weeks of Beutner’s firing the Los Angeles Times published a leaked June 2015 report from the Eli Broad Foundation, detailing Broad’s plan to transform half of Los Angeles schools to charter schools.
Beutner’s ultimate selection as superintendent of LAUSD was the product of a well-orchestrated campaign by Broad and other charter school advocates to take over the Los Angeles School Board.
The 2017 school board election became the most expensive ($15 million) in the country, with much of the money coming from outside of California, and resulted in the election of a pro-charter majority who then selected Beutner as the new Superintendent in 2018.
In that election, nearly $10 million was spent by pro-charter groups. Of that $10 million, $5.14 million was spent by a group known as Parent Teacher Alliance. Another $2.8 million was spent by the Charter Schools Association Advocates (CCSA).
The CCSA transferred $4.53 million to the Parent Teacher Alliance group before the election and also soon after receiving a $7 million contribution from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. In other words, it is highly probable that the new school board and, in turn, Beutner himself, were installed with the wealth of a single individual.
Beutner, who is now 58, has no background in education, or in administering a school or school district. He is, as is apparent, a world renown financier, who has had a very lucrative career extracting huge profits for himself and his investors by privatizing public assets and slashing the wages and benefits of workers.
It is these credentials that Beutner is expected to utilize, with the acquiescence of the unions, to force teachers and students to accept conditions mandated by drastically underfunded budgets. The austerity demands have been imposed for decades by California’s Democratic governors and Democratic-controlled state legislatures, all of whom were and continue to be elected with the endorsement and support of the unions.
Beutner is wasting no time in ruthlessly attempting to suppress the emerging opposition of Los Angeles teachers. He most recently announced the hiring of hundreds of strike-breaking substitutes in the event of strike along with attempting to obtain an injunction preventing special education teachers from striking along with their colleagues on Thursday. The latter was struck down by a federal judge over the weekend.
Los Angeles and California teachers should be warned. Beutner and a whole host of figures will accept no obstacles in their drive to privatize the district and cut teachers wages and benefits. The United Teachers of Los Angeles, UTLA, has no intention to organize a serious fight back against Beutner and his allies in the political establishment. In fact, the UTLA has centered its platform entirely around the election of Democratic Party candidates and various ballot measures that will do nothing to better fund public education.
The only way forward for Los Angeles Teachers is to form their own rank and file committees with teachers around the state and around the country independently of the unions and the two parties of big business. There is enormous sentiment in favor of Los Angeles teachers both within the city and internationally. That sentiment can only find effective political expression by mobilizing the working class against the both corporate controlled parties and the capitalist system they defend.




Los Angeles Braces for Massive Teachers’ Strike Thursday


emtpy classroom
Pixabay
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3:14













Los Angeles public schools will be hit by a massive teachers’ strike this week, as the teachers’ unions attempt to make the L.A. Unified School District bow to its demands for higher wages and more teachers.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Ronald S.W. Lew ruled that the district could not block the teachers from striking due to concern for the welfare of special education students.
The union celebrated the judge’s ruling, according to the Los Angeles Times. Parents across the city are now bracing for the strike, which is scheduled to start on Thursday — causing the maximum disruption possible to families after the winter holiday break.
Breitbart TV

The Wall Street Journal‘s Allysia Finley noted in an op-ed on Saturday:
The district’s looming financial crisis is a simple math problem. State funding is tied to enrollment, which is shrinking. Yet the district’s fixed costs are growing. Retirement benefits make up about 15% of district spending, nearly 50% more than in 2013. The district is spending $350 million annually on retiree health benefits, which would be enough to award each teacher a $10,000 raise.
In 2012, as stocks and capital gains were rising, California voters approved a tax hike on high earners. State spending per pupil has increased by 65% since then, allowing LAUSD to avoid tough financial decisions and give teachers a 10% raise in 2015. The district even built a $1.8 billion reserve. But LAUSD is now burning through cash so fast that it could become insolvent within three years. This prompted the county to warn last fall of a possible takeover. If a district runs large deficits, state law requires counties to intervene.
Enter Alex Caputo-Pearl, the teachers union president, who is pushing the district to increase spending by hundreds of millions of dollars annually in a new collective-bargaining agreement with teachers. Topping the union’s many demands are a 6.5% raise, reduced class sizes, and additional support staff. The union also wants the district to lobby state lawmakers to limit charter-school growth.
Politics also play a role in the standoff between the union and the school board. In 2017, charter school advocates won seats on the district’s school board. But in 2018, teachers’ unions defeated charter school board champion Marshall Tuck for the position of state school superintendent, installing Tony Thurmond in the position instead.
The Journal also notes that the teachers union is desperate to flex its muscle after last year’s Supreme Court decision in Janus v. AFSCME, which prevents public sector unions from forcing non-members to pay dues.
The losers in the dispute: the children, who are underserved by a district that already struggles to meet basic educational standards; and the working poor, who have few child care options when children are not in school.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.


THE DEATH of CALIFORNIA:

CALIFORNIA UNDER MEX-OCCUPATION: POVERTY, GANG CRIME, STAGGERING LA RAZA WEFLARE STATE on LEGALS’ BACKS

SHOCKING REPORT OF POVERTY, CRIME AND LA RAZA SUPREMACY

http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/05/california-passes-uk-to-become-worlds.html



Unions celebrate California election victory with LA school strike



The first crisis for California's new Democrat governor and veto-proof legislature will be an L.A. teachers' strike affecting 640,000 students in the wildly insolvent Los Angeles Unified School District. 
Teacher union contributions to federal and state political campaigns rose from $4.3 million in 2004 to $32 million in 2016, with 99 percent going to liberals and Democrats.
Their biggest 2018 election triumph came in California, where teacher unions, the largest contributor in almost every election, funded a Democrat "blue tsunami" that swept every state executive office, captured veto-proof majorities in both houses of the legislature, and flipped seven U.S. congressional seats.
Governor Gavin Newsom ran on a "cradle-to-career" public education agenda that promised to spend at least another $2.37 billion on education to expand prenatal care, introduce universal preschool for four-year-olds, start a college savings accounts for every kindergartner, and guarantee two years of free community college tuition.  California teacher unions rewarded Newsom's union job expansion promises with $116,800 in campaign cash as his largest contributor. 
But as soon as just three days after Newsom sworn in as governor, at least 27,267 of the L.A. Unified School District's 33,500 teachers, nurses, counselors, and librarians will go on a strike.
California is America's most unionized state, with about 2.5 million members, or 15.5 percent of the working population.  But despite their political clout, California unions in 2017 suffered their first decline in six years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The shrinking union membership is coming from the state and local government entities, where Democrat politicians have signed blanket employee contracts.  LAUSD full-time teachers make $89,000 per year, about 25 percent more than the $71,666 state average.  But 4 percent, for religious, or just broke Millennial reasons, refused to pay United Teachers of Los Angeles's $988.20 in union fees despite significantly coercive automatic deductions. 
The number of these union "refuseniks" at UTLA is expected to skyrocket after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees on June 2018: "States and public-sector unions may no longer extract agency fees from nonconsenting employees." 
Most organizations would be expected to try to maximize membership by cutting dues.  But UTLA union president Alex Caputo-Pearl championed a 33-percent increase in union dues to offset the 25-percent decline in LAUSD students after parents of 245,000 students rebelled against a district where only 22 percent of 4th-graders test as proficient at math left the district or are now sending their children to non-union charter schools.
The reasons for UTLA to strike LAUSD are not about wage increases, an independent mediator found in December: "District offer of a 6% increase is warranted based on the comparative position of the bargaining unit in wages and benefits."
UTLA is desperate to maintain its dwindling union membership by decreasing student-teacher ratio; adding more support staff; and prodding LAUSD to lobby Newsom and the state legislature to limit growth at charter schools, which already have long waiting lists.
But the L.A. school district, with a $7.5-billion budget, is already projecting deficits of $300 million in each of the next three years.  Declining enrollment, delayed facilities maintenance, and mandated special education increases are part of the problem.  The biggest challenge is a doubling of retirement contributions since 2013 to $350 million a year.  That works out to the equivalent of a $10,000 raise for every teacher.
The UTLA union bargaining agents claim that the deficit will be only about $100 million, because the "downsizing" of the number of students in public schools will end if the LAUSD reinvests in a better union contract.
To cover the loss of over 25,000 striking teachers, the Los Angeles Unified School District's contingency plan calls for bringing in about 400 substitute teachers and reassigning 2,000 non-union employees with teaching credentials to classrooms.  It is unclear how the substitutes will handle classrooms with ten times the normal student-teacher ratio.

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