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Vol. 82/No. 12 March 26, 2018
(lead article)
Inspired by W.Va. victory workers organize to fight
Victory of W.Va. teachers builds labor movement
Kentucky Education Association
Teachers protest government attacks March 12 at state Capitol in
Frankfort, Kentucky.
BY EMMA JOHNSON
BOONE COUNTY, W.Va. — The March 6 victory in the strike of teachers and
all school workers in West Virginia came out of a powerful social
movement, where union members took ownership of their struggle and won
solidarity from coal miners, students and other workers across the state
and beyond. Their unity, discipline and organization pushed back all
attempts by the government to divide and conquer the workers. They
showed that the working class can use their unions to fight and to win.
These workers built on the growing anger in West Virginia against the
effects on working people of continuing assaults by the bosses and their
government, assaults that grow out of the crisis of their capitalist
system. Coal miners have been special victims of these attacks, as union
jobs have dried up and deadly black lung disease has roared back in the
coalfields. There is a long history of miners’ battles and use of their
union, which the school workers used, holding “red shirt” days, the
color the miners wore in some of their biggest battles. And a tradition
of distrust of government at all levels.
Their victory has had a special impact on teachers in other states where
their pay, health care, pensions and working conditions are set by the
state government, including in Oklahoma, Kentucky, Mississippi and
Arizona. Conditions facing school workers there mirror those in West
Virginia, and strike talk is growing.
Alberto Morejon, a 25-year-old junior high school history teacher and
junior varsity baseball coach in Stillwater, Oklahoma, says he was
inspired by West Virginia teachers and decided to emulate their example.
He started a Facebook page — “Oklahoma Teacher Walkout—The Time Is Now”
— for teachers and other public workers to discuss what they could do.
Some 65,000 workers have signed up as of March 12.
The Oklahoma Education Association union held a March 8 press
conference, where Morejon spoke, and announced that unless the state
government agrees to their demands they will go on strike April 2 and
call for a mass protest at the Capitol that day.
A team of Socialist Workers Party members went to West Virginia to join
in solidarity with the school workers and learn more about the growing
social movement there. They joined protests in the capital, traveled
around the state, and spent a day in three southern counties — McDowell,
Wyoming and Boone.
Workers in the south — in the heart of West Virginia’s coal country —
took the lead in getting the movement going. Back in November, they
started building unity among members of the three unions — the West
Virginia Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers-West
Virginia and the West Virginia School Service Personnel Association.
They mobilized for meetings and held “walk-ins,” gatherings outside
schools to inform parents about the issues and protests they were planning.
On Feb. 2, workers in four southern counties got the “Blue Flu” and went
to rally outside the Capitol in Charleston. And then the movement grew
fast all over the state.
Students in Boone County stood up and made it clear that legislators
couldn’t use them against the teachers. To make the point, they reached
out to students across the state and organized more than 1,000 students
to march in Charleston in solidarity with the strike March 2.
Influence of battles in the coalfields
Workers on the picket line make the point that students learned more
from their strike and the discussions and organizing that prepared for
it than anything in the classroom could have taught them. Many students
volunteered for food packing and distribution operations with union
members and others to provide meals for those who depend on the food
they get in school.
Retired coal miner Fred Powers gave a history lesson to students and
their families at the Bramwell Train Depot in nearby Mercer County. He
told them about what conditions were like when he started working
underground, using a mechanical canary in a cage to illustrate how they
warned miners about rising methane levels.
“So long as the bird was singing, the air was safe, but if it stopped
you’d better get out,” Powers said. “A canary cost a day’s pay and
working days were often 12 to 14 hours.” Miners also liked rats for
company, he said, because they too would alert miners, fleeing when they
sensed the tunnel was becoming unsafe.
The influence of the history of the battles of coal miners marked the
school workers’ fight. Workers wore red bandanas in honor of the
historic coal miners’ war against local cops and company goons at Blair
Mountain in 1921. Teachers and students discussed the bloody battle
there, where thousands of armed miners took on machine guns and hired
planes dropping tear gas and shrapnel. Because of their bandanas, the
miners were called the “Red Neck Army.” Countless strikers and students
here belong to coal mining families.
Steve White, a Boone County native and third-generation miner in his
40s, gave us a tour of the area around Bim, his home town.
“I worked underground for 17 years,” he said. “But I decided to quit for
health reasons a couple years ago. My father died of black lung a short
while back and I have the first symptoms of it myself.”
Southern West Virginia is where miners fought bloody battles to retake
their union in the late 1960s and ’70s — a revolution in the United Mine
Workers union to fight for miners’ right to safe working conditions with
power to stop production when needed. Free health clinics were
established throughout the region. Incidents of black lung declined more
than 90 percent.
“Black lung never really went away and now it’s back,” said White.
“People strongly support the teachers. We need a fight and we need a
victory.” White’s wife Kim is a teacher’s assistant.
West Virginia has been ravished by the moral, political and economic
crisis of capitalism today. Boone County, with a population of 25,000,
has lost more than 5,000 mining jobs in the last half decade, with
ripple effects on jobs, schools, social services, health care and retail.
As the union’s strength has waned, black lung has roared back, mainly in
the southern counties, and is hitting younger miners. Under these
conditions pain medication is widely available and southern West
Virginia has one the country’s highest rates of opioid overdoses.
Coal mines are reopening
As White guides us along Route 85, we can see many abandoned mines, but
we also see some that have reopened. “The one we just passed I didn’t
even know about, it must have opened in the last few days,” White said.
“A lot of people here voted for Donald Trump,” he continued. “Clinton
said we were ‘deplorables,’ while he talked about the carnage and
beautiful coal and said jobs would come back.”
“The strike comes from the same place,” Emily Comer, a teacher in
Kanawha County, told a March 10 meeting in New York. “It comes from a
place of economic desperation. That’s why people voted for Trump and
that’s why people went on strike.”
And for the same reason, workers don’t trust the government. Gov. Jim
Justice announced Feb. 27 that he was going to get strikers a 5 percent
raise and their union officials said they should go back to work.
Strikers used their union — they convened local meetings in all 55
counties, debated it, and voted to stay out on strike. “We don’t trust
the legislature,” they said. Their strike stayed solid and nine days
later they won.
Related articles:
Get in a car, take a plane, join workers in struggle!
Bosses disregard for safety led to Washington Amtrak derailment
Appalachia telecom workers strike against Frontier
Ky. teachers fight threat of government pension cuts
Uptick spurs jobs, picks up confidence of working class
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