The condescending anti-worker editorials are coming fast from The Trib. Today’s is about a possible strike by Tacoma teachers (who have already once agreed not to strike, and got nothing for that).
They have starkly different visions of what that is. Teachers want to hold the line on salaries, class sizes, and policies regarding displacements and transfers. School administrators, facing state and federal mandates to improve performance and the prospect of yet more budget cutbacks, want more flexibility from the teachers union so that they can deal with those challenges.
If it’s public or private, “flexibility” means management does whatever the hell it wants without any accountability.
Tacoma’s teachers should vote today not to strike, to keep teaching and to continue negotiating without a contract. If they do vote to strike, the administration should immediately seek a court injunction. Any judge that gets the case should assess daily fines on teachers who do not report to their classrooms.
However Tacoma teachers vote today, I oppose this anti-union strategy. A strike is a big deal, and I think it’s fair to say that they would prefer to be teaching. But the teachers know what’s at stake more than the ed boards, and if 80% of members are willing to strike, it says more about the administration than the union.
The Trib still in business? I was in Kennewick this weekend and several “News Tribune” vans were parked outside the Tri-City Herald.
This is another example of the fucking mess we are in.
The right, by its arrogance, racism, and funding agendas have forced teachers into a corner. The result is a profession that itself is in trouble and fighting for its workers’ jobs.
The real victims … our kids.
God @2:
And if there’s anyone who knows about kids as victims, it’s God.
At one point the the trib claimed the teachers shouldn’t strike because it would be too big of a burden on parents. I thought that they were going to catch hell for that until I heard lots of people I know in Tacoma echoing the same comment. Just shut up and babysit my kid!
I’m about ready to give up on Tacoma. Some really good and talented people gave fixing up the place a try, but failed.
@3
I think SJ forgot to change his handle, or rather hamdel.
I’m not a big fan of teacher strikes. What I saw over the years was that teacher strikes encouraged the legislator to take money away from state workers, who didn’t strike, and give it to teachers as a reward for striking. In the big urban school districts, the teachers benefitting from this system were better paid than state workers to begin with.
Although teachers sometimes tried to cloak their strikes with this-is-for-the-kids rhetoric, it usually was transparently about money. In addition, teacher militancy also seemed to pit relatively well-paid senior teachers against poorly-paid young teachers. When was the last time you saw a strike over raising beginning teachers’ pay?
Invariably, teacher strikes are timed for the beginning of the school year, when they can exert maximum leverage on school boards. Whether you like it or not, schools do in fact perform a child care function for working families, and teacher strikes are designed to put pressure on parents to pressure school boards to settle on any terms. That’s exactly what happens, and then school boards have to rob their budgets of other necessities (such as textbook purchases) to pay off the teachers. School boards don’t have the option of demanding more money from the state or raising school taxes to make ends meet.
All in all, I’m pro-union and pro-worker, and I’m sympahetic to the many problems that teachers face in trying to deliver quality education to our communities’ children. But in a world of limited resources and competing priorities, teacher unions haven’t always exercised restraint or good judgment in pursuing their piece of the pie. I’m certainly not on board with TNT’s stridently anti-union ideology, but I think every contract and strike should be judged on its own merits. One can certainly fault the editorialists for substituting a knee-jerk editorial for thoughtful analysis of issues.
The strike with the most immediate negative result is a garbage workers’ strike. The one with the least effect would be a lawyers’ strike.
Teachers strikes happen, just like everywhere else, when their contracts expire. We need to change how the contracts work. I’ll let people who are better equipped than I argue the finer points on this one.
Of course they do. What bothers me is that people seem to start thinking of anyone that might do something that makes them deviate from their schedule as “the enemy.”
So is the problem the teachers or the legislature? The teachers didn’t force the legislature to act this way, they did it on their own. We need to ditch about 50% of our state legislature. The Seattle folks should be the first to go.
Yep! And I don’t think the Tacoma teachers should strike on this one. I, also, don’t think parents (especially the supposedly liberal ones I know in Tacoma) should act like spoiled brats or enslave themselves to “the schedule” or that the legislature should rob one group to payoff another.
@7 See, that’s the whole damned trouble. If I could screw up the economy like bankers can, I’d be doing better.
Btw, Sen. Mary Margaret Haugen’s married to a perv.
Teachers just voted to strike, btw.
@12
Yep, some of my Tacoma peps on FB are all up in arms because they’re being inconvenienced, nothing else seems to matter. And why is having to hangout with your kid an inconvenience.
Time to thin out my FB friends list.
@12
Why the hell did I type @12?