Conversations in #MeToo: Towards a Better Culture

I see two diverging narratives emerging from our current cultural reckoning with sexual harassment and violence. One focuses on sexual harassment as a problem of individuals — the good ones, the bad ones, the victimized ones, the manipulative ones — while the other looks more broadly at the workings of a larger system or culture. I argue that in order to see real change emerge from this movement, we need to understand the problems with the more popular “individual” narrative and move towards addressing wider cultural issues, including those that exist at the college.

“I feel sorry for someone like Matt Damon, who is a decent human being. … He came out and said all men are not rapists, and he got beaten to death. Come on, this is crazy!”
- Terry Gilliam

“There is a bit of a witch hunt happening. … There are some people – famous people – being suddenly accused of touching some girl’s knee or something, and suddenly they are being dropped from their programmes.”
- Liam Neeson

#MeToo, from a narrative of individuals to a narrative of the system

The individual-focused narrative of #MeToo, the one I see most frequently in mainstream media discussions, celebrates the takedown of what we’ll call the individual “monsters” — Harvey Weinstein and Larry Nassar, for example. But when pressed to look at larger systemic problems, this narrative slides into hand-wringing and breast-beating over the hypothetical innocent men who may lose employment, social standing, freedom (or their lives, if we believe Terry Gilliam) because of some hypothetical mistake.

There’s no room in this narrative to address people who are problems but not obviously “monsters” — those guilty of less violent forms of harassment or of speaking poorly about their accused friends, for example — or larger systems and networks that are problematic even if not participating in open harassment. For example, this narrative demands that we see Al Franken as innocent — even a victim himself — because his groping and unwanted kissing is not on par with the extreme forms of rape and sexual violence committed by Weinstein, Nassar, Cosby, Moore, and other "monsters." We lose the ability to talk about the way that he harmed women whom he was meant to represent.

When we focus on individuals, all men either fall into the category of monsters deserving of punishment or else of innocent well-meaning people who would never purposefully do wrong. Positioned against these men, the survivors become either good victims — usually one of many, usually white, cisgender women — or bad ones who are overly-fragile creatures at best (delicate women taking insult where none was intended), and malicious beasts at worst (evil women out to ruin good men’s lives). These evil women are quite obviously the ones Liam Neeson and Terry Gilliam claim to see.

This narrative is reductive and serves to erase real harm and close off space needed for important conversations.

Today’s headlines seem to be either dominated by the men who’ve been flaunting their abuse of women for years, even decades, with explicit details of all of the horrors they were allowed to inflict upon women — or about the men who might be at risk for being “unfairly” accused. The men who are now “scared to even talk to women” lest they be accused of sexual harassment. And the women…the women are forgotten completely.
- Ijeoma Oluo

But there’s a second narrative, one that I believe in but which seems less mainstream, that sees the possibility that we’re at a crossroads not paved with the ruination of powerful men, but with the deep, careful reflection of people of all genders on our place within systemic violence.

The phrasing of “MeToo,” like the solidarity it represents, is more than a decade old, and at its best it represents not a place to call out individual monsters, but a way to see the scope of systemic violence. Its mainstream focus in the last few months should be recognized as the culmination of a generation of activism by feminists who have pressed us to reflect on the nature of power in our society and on how that unequal balance of power — based on gender and sexuality, yes, but also on race, social class, disability, body size, language, documentation status, and placement in a corporate structure — makes some people more vulnerable to abuse.

This narrative of #MeToo looks at recent revelations of sexual harassment and violence and sees not the threat of innocent men losing their jobs over a joke, but a long history of women “voluntarily” leaving jobs they were good at because of a culture that accepts sexist jokes as normal. We see years of survivors denied due process for their complaints of harassment (and worse) now facing deep public concern about “due process” for accused men. We see trans and gender non-conforming folx having to choose between employment and feeling safe using the bathroom, fighting against cultural stereotyping of their identities as predatory despite being harassed, assaulted, and murdered at obscenely high rates. We see people of color held back from advancement because a supervisor saw their reactions as “too aggressive.” We see farm workers who can’t speak up about the conditions of their labor for fear of deportation.

To address these kinds of violence is an uncomfortable conversation, not least because we must begin with this understanding: this narrative of the #MeToo movement, the one I will posit is the real movement, asks us to look beyond the familiar, almost comfortable, narrative that tells us that bad acts are done by individual monstrous men who can be found and easily cast out. Yes, there are bad people who have done bad things, and even those of us who want to see a radical revisioning of the prison system have a hard time feeling a lot of pity for the likes of Larry Nassar.

But the narrative of individual monsters committing monstrous acts — the narrative that overlooks the wider cultural problems — allow us to too easily ignore the more banal, everyday kinds of violence that do harm by simply looking the other way, by doing what seems normal, by following the path of least resistance, by upholding the status quo. As we look for a real end to these kinds of violence, we are asking all people to look beyond the faces of the monsters — of the Harvey Weinsteins and Larry Nassars and Roy Moores — and to the systems that have enabled them. We’re not looking for individuals who must be cast out. We’re not necessarily talking about people who need to be fired or people who need to have legal action taken against them.

Instead, I envision a call for careful reflection on the culture and the systemic power that abets this violence, and on the ways that we are all complicit in supporting it.

A Problem of Culture

One of the most frustrating part of the use of the #MeToo hashtag and the resulting conversations about sexual harassment is that they focus too much on sex, turning what should be understood as stories of workplace harassment into situations steeped in layers of discussion about consent and sexual mores. And while there’s no denying that there are some interlinked issues in play and a necessary conversation about consent in our culture, when it comes to the workplace we need to keep the focus on harassment.

The problem that we face isn’t one of dating in the office, or of men misunderstanding cues related to sexual interest. Frankly, hand-wringing over the potential future of office relationships is dismissive and offensive because the problem is environments where people with more power — whether that power comes from job title, gender, race, or any other axis of privilege — make people with less power unable to effectively do their jobs. The problem is in the harassment, and more specifically, the harassment of those with less power.

And the painful truth is that, yes, there has long been an acceptance of the kind of behaviors that do prevent people from doing their jobs. Sometimes this is extreme forms of assault, but mostly it’s just an “old boys club” environment, which can be damaging to people of all genders.

If we want to envision a workplace that is safe for all, then yes, we must address these harmful environments, and sometimes that will look like criticizing behaviors and institutions that have seemingly “always” been fine. What’s key to remember, though, is that what we see at this cultural moment — as with the heavily publicized “Shitty Media Men” list and the “Shitty Men in Academia” list) — is not the sudden turning against things that have always been fine. Rather, it’s the sudden public knowledge of what has always been. Faced with wider cultures who would not hear them, women and other folx have been using gossip and “whisper networks,” flawed as they are, to try to protect each other.

Things haven’t been fine. Those without power have just been quiet.

Even though we work in very different environments, we share a common experience of being preyed upon by individuals who have the power to hire, fire, blacklist and otherwise threaten our economic, physical and emotional security. Like you, there are few positions available to us and reporting any kind of harm or injustice committed against us doesn’t seem like a viable option.
-Alianza Nacional de Campesinas

Larry Nassar did official University HR Training (and so did everyone at Michigan State who looked the other way)

As we approach a discussion of harassment as a cultural issue, it becomes necessary to look at the the culture of our workplace at all levels. The most obvious place is, of course, Human Resources and the way that harassment is discussed at that system level.

I want to be fair to the difficult situation of HR: it exists to facilitate employee relationships, but at the same time serves the institution/management and therefore the preexisting cultural condition of the institution. It’s not hard to imagine how that can be a hell of a double-bind. Still, we’ve seen plenty of evidence recently that on a national scale, women have reported men to HR only to see no results, or taking action through HR has been disincentivized.

The efficacy of the ubiquitous HR Sexual Harassment Training has similarly been called into question, with most experts agreeing that it is a very ineffective way to address workplace cultural problems of sexual harassment. Some researchers point to a common reliance on sexual and gender stereotypes in such trainings that makes people uncomfortable. But I tend to gravitate primarily to the explanation that such trainings exist to address the institution’s legal liability, so it’s hard to look at them as a good faith attempt at changing a problem in the institutional culture. And how employees view such trainings matters, as research suggests that the value of HR Training rests primarily in the value individual employees place on the training and on the way employees view the work culture.

(I can only suggest here that an email threatening to fire those who fail to complete a training does not create an environment in which employees will take HR Training as a serious and important discussion of culture. Rather, it serves to reinforce the idea that the “real” purpose of those trainings is to protect management from legal liability, and the existence of that liability is the soul reason for such threats.)

My takeaway from this: HR (and HR Training) can only be as good as the culture it works within, and therefore, bigger changes to work culture have to look more collective than a training at the beginning of each semester.

Of course, I don’t say this to take away from the fact that we should be advocating for better training and better policies — we should absolutely be doing that. But if HR can only be as good as the culture it works for, we should simultaneously be engaged in changing that culture.

If we want to change the culture around us, we must look more deeply at the whole system — not the monstrous men, not the individuals deserving scorn, or blame, or pity, but at the places where we see power operating in ways that may be harmful or silencing.

This strikes me as an important goal for anyone who is labor-minded: to remember all the workers, all the power differentials, and to actively position ourselves to listen, learn, and support those who are ready to speak.

In that spirit, I offer these suggestions for a beginning place for action:

1. Read through the links provided throughout the essay above, particularly to feminist writing about sexual harassment, labor, and the #MeToo movement. Frequently, the positions of feminists, especially those who were steering this conversation long before Rose McGowan’s problematic leadership, are seen only in abridged or mocked contexts, and the already existing nuance in this conversation gets lost in generalized, highly individualized fears about due process and proportionality.
2. Be ready to actually listen, while also acknowledging that plenty of people who have felt victimized by parts of what has been the institution’s normal workings aren’t ready to speak. 
3. Understand the ways in which you might experience privilege based on certain axes of your identity — not just gender, but race, class, job security, citizenship and abledness — that may prevent you from seeing/noticing situations that are harmful to people with more marginalized identities.
4. Read through this link, also cited above, for some concrete suggestions for more effective ways to begin addressing workplace culture, and begin a conversation about a better way to handle HR Trainings on Sexual Harassment. Look for more discussion of how we might take action in an upcoming issue of The Advocate. 
5. Educate yourself on the current war on Title IX by Betsy DeVos and the way that these choices may harm our students, as an important, very linked conversation to this one.

Arizona Supreme Court Denies DACA Students In-State Tuition -- How this Threatens Texas College Students

This week, the Arizona Supreme Court decided that Arizona-resident DACA students no longer have in-state/in-district tuition status for colleges and universities. In their decision, the court agreed that DACA students have been granted "lawful status" by the federal government, but not "legal status" for state law to qualify for state resident rates. In other words, though these students live in the state, apparently the court does not see them legal but illegal. Wrap your head that one around for a while.

This decision affects over 2,000 students in Arizona and, without appeal to circuit court, these thousands of students will see immediate tuition increases or simply withdraw from college. The out-of-state rate will triple the tuition for these students, and of course, many cannot afford that tuition. For example, in-state students at Arizona State University will pay $9,834 for tuition next school year, while non-resident students pay $27,618.

This court decision is exactly why the federal DREAM Act is needed (and the Congress has no interest -- neither Republicans nor Democrats have the willpower to make this happen). The original federal DREAM Act was proposed in 2001, and nearly two decades later, the nation has failed these hundreds of thousands of young people. Because of this state's decision, thousands over another generation will not be able to afford higher education, promising more poverty in the state for another generation. We should notice that the Arizona Board of Regents Chair Bill Ridenour had been supportive of DACA students and stated:

"The board continues to hope that soon, a congressional enactment will establish the lawful status and presence of those who were brought to this country unlawfully as children and have remained here as law-abiding members of our communities," Ridenour said.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich's response was merely that this was "his job," arguing that all along that colleges and universities were violating state and federal laws by granting in-state tuition to DACA recipients. “It’s about time someone held them accountable, and that’s my job. My role as AG is to make sure you’re following the law,” he said. As we argue elsewhere, this kind of response that mimics others' excuses for their own impotence endangers all justice.

The Arizona AG's response -- "That's my job" -- is parallels to Texas Attorney General Paxton, who has lead the charge to sue the federal government to cancel all DACA protection of youth: “Indeed, if the injunction is maintained through June 2018, amici States will be forced to consider filing a lawsuit challenging the original 2012 memorandum creating DACA,” said Paxton in January 2018.

Why Arizona Predicts Texas's Threats to Undocumented Students

We need to appreciate that, though the federal government has continuously failed to do what functional governments should, the State of Texas was the first state with a DREAM Act, in 2001. In 2001, a Republican-majority House of Representatives and Republican-majority Senate passed HB 1403 to qualify migrants -- including some undocumented -- as residents of Texas for purposes of tuition at the rate provided to residents of this state ... and was signed by Republican Governor Rick Perry. In 2001, the people of Texas had the moral motivation to both recognize the economic and social capital of state residents, regardless of their national document status. This Texas DREAM Act has permitted tens of thousands of students who live in the state to attend the state's colleges and universities with the economic privilege of residency. This is sensible, since undocumented families pay taxes in Texas and should have the advantage of those taxes. Specifically, the current Texas DREAM Act allows in-state tuition for students who have lived in Texas for three years and either have obtained a GED or graduated from the state's public or accredited private schools. Before this act, Texas colleges treated undocumented students as international, requiring them to pay international tuition, even though most had lived in Texas for most of their lives, paying Texas taxes.

Now, if Texas AG Paxton follows Arizona's lead to further attack our undocumented students, again tens of thousands of future college students will not afford tuition.

For example, the following table demonstrates the gross disparity of in-district tuition vs international tuition.

Credit Hours	In-District	International
1	$96	$252
2	$160	$360
3	$224	$524
4	$288	$688
5	$352	$852
6	$416	$1,016
7	$480	$1,180
8	$544	$1,344
9	$608	$1,508
10	$672	$1,672
11	$736	$1,836
12	$800	$2,000

See Lone Star College.

In future blog posts, we will address real problems of working- and poverty-class students, how their poverty affects college success, and both college support and college failures to support our community members.

For now, we need to reach out to our current legislators and start a very aggressive campaign to a) oppose the Abbott-Patrick-Paxton axis attack against our students, and b) demand stronger legislation to expand protection of our undocumented students. This is a core value of the college and -- importantly -- must be a core value for the union.

Update on OK Resistance -- a 100 Mile Walking Trek to the Capitol

Resistance has multiple faces. Resistance is writing letters and cards to our representatives. Resistance is walking out of the classroom to fight for protecting students. Resistance is wearing a red shirt in solidarity with educators across the nation.

And sometimes, resistance is walking. But not just across the parking lot. We’re talking a lot of walking -- 100 miles of walking.

Our colleagues in Oklahoma started a 100-mile long trek from multiple towns and cities to the OK Capitol to demonstrate their commitment calls for an equitable pay and school budget support (see our previous post here).

Teachers making progress along Route 66 on their March for Education to OKC. pic.twitter.com/E23YEPOmwI

— Laurene Callander (@laurene_kjrh) April 4, 2018

"We do appreciate the raise. The main reasons that teachers are walking are because of the lack of funding for classrooms, the things that affect kids," said Brendan Jarvis, a seventh-grade geography teacher in Tulsa. "We're marching for the kids, for better school supplies, so teachers don't have to buy all of them out of pocket."

Image Credit: YOUTUBE: "OK TEACHERS SPEAK"

Though the OK government did offer a pay raise, the legislature had removed school budget support.
Oklahoma-AFT President Mary Best and Oklahoma City President Ed Allen issued the following statement:

“We are disappointed but not surprised that Gov. Fallin repealed the hotel/motel-tax that would have yielded additional funding for public schools. Over the last two weeks in this fight for Oklahoma’s teachers, we’ve made clear that pitting teachers against kids is a losing strategy. We will keep fighting to make sure there’s funding for both, because it’s what our teachers need, and what our kids deserve. 

“In the meantime, we encourage the state Legislature to consider quickly the wind production and capital gains tax bills as potential revenue streams: Oklahoma needs an increase in public education funding on top of teacher raises. And we need it soon, so we can get back to the classroom. 

“Make no mistake: Our teachers want to be in school—teaching. But they’ll remain in the capital until these legislators make good on their duty to fund our state’s schools.”

Thursday, thousands of educators arrived at Tulsa where they intend to meet with legislators.

This blog will follow our colleagues' success.

Teachers in other states are striking. Texas teachers can't do that.

Source: Texas Tribune

Texas statute says any employees who "strike or engage in an organized work stoppage against the state or a political subdivision of the state" will lose all their "civil service rights, reemployment rights, and any other rights, benefits, and privileges the employee enjoys as a result of public employment or former public employment."

That’s us -- we’re state employees and community colleges are “political subdivisions of the state.” This, while the State of Texas is persistently decreasing funding of community colleges while increasing regulation and control over curriculum.

Read more from the Texas Tribune.

Teachers Strikes Expand -- Updates on Kentucky and Oklahoma … and Arizona!

Source: David Wallace, Arizona Republic

Increasingly, educators in red states are exercising their constitutional rights to protest their low salaries, attacks on retirement funds, and working situations. We mentioned the wildcat walkout last week. Now, Oklahoma teachers are preparing for a strike as they reject the governor’s pay increase.

The resistance against GOP governors and legislature is also expanding in Arizona. Grassroot group Arizona Educators United and the union affiliate, the Arizona Education Association, call for a 20% pay raise, while Governor Ducey adamantly rejects this proposal, with a mere 1% increase.

The Texas AFT stands in solidarity with our colleagues in Oklahoma:

At its core, this is about teachers’ and school support workers’ heartbreaking teaching and learning conditions. Funding public education adequately is a fight that we must win because it’s the right thing for our kids, for our economy and for America.

For a summary of the KY and OK strikes, read this Mercury News article and for more information on the Arizona labor initiative, see a brief summary by NPR Illinois. We also recommend appreciating the strength of women in these strikes, here at USA Today.

Kentucky Teachers Call Wildcat Walkout In Resistance to Legislative Pension Scuttle

Source: Sarah Coomes Crisp, Twitter

Over the past 10 years, Republican-controlled legislatures across the country have slashed corporate taxes, decimated school funding, ignored teachers’ pleas for raises, and tried their best to crush public employees’ collective bargaining power through unions. Now, the teachers are fighting back. After West Virginia teachers went on strike, similar actions have been sweeping red states, from Oklahoma, to Arizona, and now, to Kentucky.

Last week, the Republican legislature majority unveiled a new 291-page pension bill, zipped it through both the House and Senate, and sent it to the governor's desk -- all in less than nine hours.

In response, many Kentucky schools closed on Friday as teachers walked out, according to the Courier Journal. The Kentucky Education Association, which represents teachers and other education professionals, slammed the pension law as a "classic legislative bait and switch."

It stripped all the 'local provision of wastewater services' language out of SB151 and replaced it with many of the harmful provisions of SB1. ... We haven't seen the bill, weren't allowed to testify. The bill hasn't had the required actuarial analysis, includes no fiscal impact statement and no fiscal note.

For more information, read “Teacher walkouts over pay and pensions have spread to Kentucky” at Vice.com

SB4, Unjust Laws, and LSC

This article picks up a conversation about how laws governing immigration affect our college students. You can read the other parts here [1, 2, 3].

Brief Updates with DACA and SB4

1. The Fifth Circuit of Appeals: A three-judge panel unanimously sustained Texas SB4. We address this as the main of our discussion, below.
2. Neither Democrats nor Republicans amassed willingness to pass a clean DREAM Act to protect hundred of thousands of young migrants affected by the loss of DACA.
3. ICE increases aggressive separation of families across the country, including separating parents from children; as part of their strategy, ICE continues consistent policies of disinformation to confuse local communities and institutions
4. Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions III, U.S. Attorney General -- never a friend of migrants -- has promised "using every power” in his suit against the State of California’s sanctuary laws, using rhetoric supporting Arizona’s HB 1070 (“Show Your Papers”), which has largely been shown to be unconstitutional.
5. On 26 February, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the president’s appeal of the Ninth Circuit Court Jan. 9 nationwide injunction that halted Trump’s move to rescind DACA. Therefore, Homeland Security resumed DACA renewals. The White House appeal now returns to the Ninth Circuit.

Source: Center for Law and Social Policy

The Fifth Circuit -- Abandoning the Fourth Amendment

The Fifth Circuit -- the most conservative of appellate courts -- held that SB4

• is not preempted under the federal Constitution’s Supremacy Clause;
• its section requiring local governments (including public colleges) to comply with ICE immigration detainer requests does not violate the Fourth Amendment; and
• its provision prohibiting local laws or policies that “materially limit” immigration enforcement activities is not so vague as to violate the Fourteenth Amendment.

Importantly, the Fifth Circuit clarified that local entities -- such as colleges -- are not required to collaborate with federal immigration enforcement; that is, the court identified how local entities may help federal officials and whether they must. Stunningly, the Fifth Court ignored the Fourth Amendment (“against unreasonable searches and seizures”) when it comes to immigration arrest authority. The Court announced that immigration arrests do not require evidence of criminality; instead, the Court claims: “we…disavow any district court decisions that have suggested the Fourth Amendment requires probable cause of criminality in the immigration context.” Remember that immigration courts do not require defense, and migrants often are un-represented before the bench.

Remember, too, that ICE does not require warrants for entering private residences or business … or colleges. ICE uses Form I-274A which is not a warrant requiring a judge’s determination of “probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation.” No warrants. No defense. No rights. Professor of Law Michael Kagan notes:

At issue here is the power of the government to detain a person, citizen or immigrant, without probable cause, and without immediate review. An autocrat would very much enjoy this power.

Texas and Unjust Laws and Why a College Matters

We start with the idealistic and often untrue assumption that we all have rights in our republic: specifically, The Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution give defendants the right to counsel — to be represented by an attorney in court proceedings. But recall that the Immigration Courts do not provide defense counsel if the defense cannot pay legal protection, like criminal courts do. Further, ICE has increasingly threatened all organizations — private and public—that oppose his hatred. Not surprisingly, the Texas axis of Abbott-Patrick-Paxton enthusiastically support Albence’s xenophobic stance. These two truths — the White House hunts undocumented migrants and immigration courts do not provide defense for indigent migrants — act as inhumane, uncivilized, immoral, and hostile against anti-American claims of a just system. Attorney General Paxton, again, conflates all immigrants as criminals:

Enforcing immigration law prevents the release of individuals from custody who have been charged with serious crimes. ... Dangerous criminals shouldn’t be allowed back into our communities to possibly commit more crimes.

Meanwhile, the current practice of ICE sees all undocumented migrants as targets for detention and deportation.

We see that already in our college. Our undocumented students or students with undocumented family members are increasingly stressed, absent from class, and withdrawing. I have had a student who withdrew because his undocumented family returned to Mexico; the student needed to work to support his nephews and nieces. Another student’s family has made her -- at age 21 -- the legal custodian of her little brother in case parents are deported. Other students in threatened families just disappear, without a conversation. A recent study by Kathleen Roche in The Journal of Adolescent Health shows that students in undocumented families are experiencing increased emotional stress under the current U.S. immigration policies.

With that context, we return to SB4 and the State of Texas’s insistent assault on our college students.

Labor News (UPDATE): Black Hawk College Union Members Overwhelmingly Approve Vote to Strike

UPDATE: 

The Black Hawk College strike was averted after an agreement was reached between the Union and the board. Educators will have improved pay, health care, and fairer overtime loads.

Source: Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images

Black Hawk College is a community college in Illinois with campuses in the cities of Moline and Galva. AFT colleagues in the Illinois Federation of Teachers (Local 1836) voted on 9 March 2018 to strike as negotiations between the union and administration have stalled. The union has not had a contract since the summer 2017. On March 9, it filed an intent-to-strike notice with BHC, paving the way for the union to strike after a 10-day waiting period that expired Monday.

Union member Professor Galen Leonhardy argues:

Whether our board members force us to strike or recognize the vulgarity of their recent rationalizations, I refuse to take yet another pay reduction, refuse to pay even more for health care, and refuse to support a board that wants to decrease by thousands and thousands of dollars, junior faculty members’ retirements.  

I refuse to have faith in and support a board that has spent millions adding buildings on campus while enrollments fell, new buildings, one of which remains essentially hollow, a place of learning without learners.  

I am done with authoritarian board members hiring and subsequently empowering authoritarian administrators who have fixated on chilling academic freedom while failing to fulfill their own basic responsibilities.

Our union leaders are doing a super job of helping members hold onto our health care, achieve a basic cost of living increase, prevent the board members from diminishing junior faculty members’ retirements, and keep the board members from cutting the salaries of our senior faculty members.  

Our union leaders have negotiated for more than a year with board members, with elected officials who have very limited backgrounds in education, folks who were willing to pay a lawyer astronomical amounts (over $100,000) just to prevent faculty and professional/technical employees from having even a cost of living raise.  Yet those same board members have given raises to our administrators (who appear to pay for their raises by laying off faculty members).

Thanks to the union, we have a wonderful health care and insurance plan. Had we trusted that our administrators would take care of us, we would never have had the quality of health care we currently enjoy.   If I get sick or have an accident, I will be taken care of.  I have a child who needed hospitalization, and the insurance covered almost all of the expenses.  Our family members get to attend the first two years of college for almost nothing.  I have a fair wage and a great retirement plan. And I have To thank the union for all of those things that help me to feel glad that I have the job I have.

Obviously, I am proud to be a union member, grateful to those past faculty members who put their jobs on the line to create the union, and honored to continue that legacy for future faculty members.

For an update on the negotiations:

http://qconline.com/news/bhc-union-exchange-contract-proposals/article_26cb88a9-5b50-5490-b135-b427fe0aac31.html

Considering Our Profession as a Death Sentence

In light of recent violence in Florida, Maine, Austin, and elsewhere, educators and staff must be aware of how education has shifted over decades from a respite of intellectual conversations to a politicized (and often silenced) rhetoric of violence -- physical, sexual, and emotional violence. Managers (politicians, including very local elected or “selected” politicians in the guise of educator administrators) respond to violence as policy and police without the systemic critique how society sees educators and students as threats.

Educator P. L. Thomas addresses this is part of his blog critique of the neoliberal educational complex:

For decades now, many of us in education who believe in the possibility of universal public education have feared the death of teaching and learning, but we have imagined that coming from policy, free market and accountability approaches to so-called reform.

But something more sinister is happening: Schools have always labored under the weight of the communities they serve, and teaching and learning is now dying a slow and horrible death because of America’s gun culture combined with those bureaucratic monsters many of us were mostly pointing to.

To read more, see Thomas’s “The Death of Teaching and Learning in America.”

Labor News: West Virginia Educators on Strike -- Update

On Tuesday, West Virginia officials agreed to a budget deal, ending the teacher strike by raising pay for all state workers by 5 percent. The deal follows more than a week of protests across the Appalachian state supported by the AFT.

More than 277,000 students were out of the classroom for nine school days as teachers pressed for higher salaries in West Virginia, where pay ranks near the bottom for U.S. teachers. 

The West Virginia Education Association hailed the deal, saying on its Facebook page: “WE WON!”

The win for teachers is especially notable given their political situation. While West Virginia has no laws explicitly making such a strike illegal, public employees such as teachers do not have a legal right to strike against their state or to collectively bargain. Teachers participating in the strike risked disciplinary action in mounting a work-stoppage, but they still worked together to make themselves heard, rally public support, and improve pay for all state workers. 

To remind us that these educators’ lives are among the poorest labor environment (the 48th lowest salary in the nation), we recommending the interview with teacher Katie Endicott, a high school English teacher, with the New York Times. 

We also recommend another interview with Jacobin’s Eric Blanc, who sat down with Jay O’Neal, a middle-school teacher and union activist in Charleston. O’Neal explains his organizing strategies, parents’ attitudes (positive), and union member dynamicism.

In the wake of the success of these teachers, it appears teachers in Oklahoma — one of only two states with lower pay than West Virginia before their action — may be following.