Low pay, oversized classrooms, underfunding, old textbooks, a lack of support staff and high teacher turnover rates. These are a few of the reasons teachers across the United States cite as motivations behind a fresh wave of teacher strikes this year, restarting a phenomenon that provided a massive boost to the US labor movement in 2018.
So far in 2019 strikes have broken out in Los Angeles and Oakland in California, Denver in Colorado and in Virginia and West Virginia, notching up notable wins in terms of pay raises and better working conditions.
The fresh push on strikes has come despite a June 2018 supreme court ruling in the Janus case that held non-union members in the public sector do not have to pay union fees. The decision was seen as a serious blow to unions but teacher unions, at least, have avoided massive membership and funding losses and instead continued a nationwide burst of recruiting, organizing and successful strike actions.
For Tania Kappier, a history teacher at Oakland Technical high school and board member of a teachers union in Oakland , the motivations for taking action are simple and at the core of their job.
“Our work conditions are the student’s education conditions. We’re doing the best we can at an impossible job and that’s not okay for our students and it’s not okay for our own dignity,” Kappier said.
Kappier explained classrooms in Oakland’s school district are too large, her history textbooks are outdated, schools in the district don’t have nurses, adequate staffing of counselors, no librarians, and music and art programs are non-existent at some schools in the district. She also noted teachers in Oakland are not paid enough to make ends meet in a district where rental costs have soared 51.1% between 2012 to 2017.
The issues facing public schools in Oakland are similar to other school districts across America where teachers led a 30-year high in strikes in 2018. A common theme of these walkouts is drastic declines in public funding schools, where many states have not replenished cuts…
