A chance for teachers to stand up

PUBLIC EDUCATION is poised on the edge in California. There is a strong likelihood that our schools will be eviscerated by $10.6 billion in cuts. But there's also a possibly that teachers will rebel and seize on this crisis to fundamentally transform the way the state functions.

The global recession has hit California particularly hard, leaving the state budget $40 billion in the red over the next 18 months. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has taken advantage of this doomsday scenario to aggressively push a new, anti-worker state budget proposal that includes:

--$17 billion in cuts, primarily to education, health care and welfare payments that will lower the quality of life for millions of working families and result in mass layoffs of state workers.

$14 billion in new taxes, primarily a regressive 1 cent sales tax hike that disproportionately burdens working-class people, who spend a greater share of their income on basic taxable goods than the middle class or the wealthy.

Borrowing $5 billion against future lotto sales (which prey on the desperation of the poor who cannot find secure jobs and instead gamble for a miniscule shot at economic prosperity).

Borrowing $4.6 billion in short-term loans.

For much of the buildup to the current crisis, the California Teachers Association (CTA) has taken a "wait-and-see" approach that left us flat-footed when the governor made his budget proposal last month.

Now we've lost months of organizing time to prepare for this attack on our members--and the families that rely on the services provided by local public schools (daytime care, education, nutritious lunches, etc.).

The way that "business unionism" rots away our strength becomes readily apparent in situations like now. A staff member of the CTA recently remarked, "This will be the greatest job loss in California school history, including the year after Prop 13 passed."

So what's the response? The union is recalling all retired staff and organizing workshops for new lawyers to handle the due process rights of the anticipated tens of thousands of laid-off teachers.

This strategy borders on planning the funeral before the patient has died--or even exhausted every course of treatment. Massive layoffs are only inevitable if we accept the framework that "everyone" should sacrifice to resolve this crisis. The CTA's position that cuts must be balanced with revenue increases is a concession that sets us up for defeat.

We must reject the governor's budget proposal in toto and resist it tooth and nail. Teachers and students must not pay one cent for a crisis created by Wall Street greed and government deregulation (the logic of free-market capitalism).

THE CTA's other response to the budget cuts so far is to back an initiative to raise the sales tax by one percent to fund K-14 education. Ridiculously, this is more conservative than the governor's own proposed tax increases, alienates a section of CTA membership that teaches in state colleges (not to mention other public-sector unions) and does nothing to address the root cause of the crisis.

This isn't just the wrong response, it's a distraction from the type of campaign it will actually take to save schools and jobs in California. For instance, there's a serious push for a statewide day of action on March 13, "Pink Friday," the day that school districts will give pink slips to tens of thousands of teachers. This is the right action for the CTA to take, even though actions will probably be modest.

"Pink Friday" is an opening that local unions can seize upon. Local unions should consider more militant action, including civil disobedience and daylong strikes. (The type of struggle that won the day during the Great Depression.) United Teachers Los Angeles, representing 45,000 educators, is heading in the direction of exercising the real power we represent: without teachers, there can be no schools.

Our unions should also open up a debate about the way the crisis has played out in California. The state remains one of the world's wealthiest economies and is home to more than enough wealth to genuinely fund our schools.

For instance, the state's brazenly unfair income tax would make even Ronald Reagan blush. A teacher earning $45,000 pays the same rate as a corporate executive taking in $900,000. The massive corporate tax shelter known as Proposition 13 should be repealed. And the draconian "three strikes" law--which mandates lifetime sentences for repeat offenders, no matter their "crime"--costs nearly $1 billion annually.

We can't afford to be a "bread and butter" union fighting for a bigger slice of the pie at a time when the state's politicians are happy to let the pie shrink. Left unchecked, our union appears on a course of capitulating to billions in cuts while holding out hope for a stimulus package from Washington. That the Senate version of the stimulus bill cut $40 billion from state education programs should be enough of a wake-up call that this strategy is reckless at best.

Yet the scale of this crisis is so vast that it completely discredits the business-as-usual approach of public-sector unions that rely on lobbyists at the state capitol to work with "our friends" in the Democratic Party. Even during the height of the technology and housing bubbles over the past 10 years, California had consistently ranked near the bottom of all states in per pupil funding. Our friends weren't good to us when the cash was piling up, and we shouldn't have many illusions in their solidarity with us when the going gets tough.

This time period may mark the worst decline in working-class living standards since the Great Depression. But it also presents an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rebuild the labor movement and roll back the clock to a time when militant unions put capital on the defensive.

This is not the time to shy away from radical politics in our unions. No other political framework represents the working-class movement as well as socialist ideas, which explain the crisis rooted in the cyclical nature of booms and busts in the profit system and point toward a solution through class struggle.
John Green, Hayward, Calif.