OAKLAND, USA, March 8—“Vote it up or vote it down, either way we go back into the same classrooms in a school system designed to produce masters and slaves, workers and bosses. We need more than a strike. We need a revolution!”
At the strike ratification vote meeting on March 2, a comrade went up and down the line of teachers waiting to get into the meeting. While a gaggle of phony communists handed out leaflets urging teachers to vote NO, we talked about fighting for communism. Dozens of teachers took Red Flag. A kindergarten teacher asked us to get in touch with her after the strike.
The strike opened with a bang, but ended with a whimper. From the start, parents and students marched and picketed and fed the strikers. Passing trucks honked support. Churches opened their spaces for ‘solidarity’ schools. Strikers demanded smaller classes, no school closures, no staff cuts and better teacher retention (meaning higher pay for the lowest paid teachers in Alameda County). This presented the strike as a political as well as economic cause.
These demands expressed a collective community anger at the racist inequalities in education and social life. And the anger was obvious in all the energy a huge section of teachers had shown in the pre-strike organizing.
Yet, it collapsed on the 7th day when the union leadership pushed for a Tentative Agreement that cut class size by one student a year for two years. It stopped school closures for only 5 months, agreed to staff cuts and got teachers a raise that will not keep pace with inflation. Demoralized by these concessions, many teachers felt they could win nothing by prolonging a strike which had such spineless leaders. A slim majority voted to end the strike.
But on Monday, March 3, when the schools reopened, students from Oakland High School and Oakland Tech walked out. They marched to the school district headquarters to protest against the cuts, especially in support staff who work with the students most impacted by the crisis of capitalism.
Our work in the strike was modest, mostly due to factors beyond our control. But we were able to go to the picket line with Red Flag towards the end of the strike. We met up with teachers we know who we will continue to work with throughout the school year.
In Oakland, as in the January strike in Los Angeles, the key is to see that this struggle is not just a trade union struggle. Parents, students, and other school employees are not just supporters of the teachers’ struggle, but workers who have the potential to fight for revolutionary change in education and social life.
Our signs should have reflected that. Instead of saying “We stand with teachers and kids,” we should have said “We stand with the picketers” meaning the teachers, parents, aides and students. Surely in the post-revolutionary society we aim to build, it will be that broad combination of forces (not teachers alone) that will design a new system of communist education. We must link the struggle against the racist capitalist hell we fight today with the revolutionary communist future we aim to build. The struggle continues!
