‘This Is Much Bigger Than Us, Than Our Union, Even Than Our City’

Teachers, parents, and students picket outside City Hall in Los Angeles on Friday, January 18, 2019. (AP Photo / Damian Dovarganes)

How LA’s teachers joined forces with the community and won a landmark labor contract.

By Sarah Jaffe
The Nation

Jan 23, 2019 – On the morning of Friday January 18, the fifth and last full day of the United Teachers Los Angeles strike, some 2,000 parents and students stood hand in hand along Colfax Avenue, creating a chain that stretched nearly a mile, from North Hollywood High to Colfax Elementary to Walter Reed Middle School. They wore red, as they had all week, in solidarity with the educators, and they were jubilant—finally, after a week of very un-LA-like rainy weather, the sun was out. The mood was electric, more so even than when the strike had begun. Partly, it was due to the sunshine, but also to a sense that they were winning.

The parents had organized the action themselves on a Facebook group. Outside Colfax Elementary a parent was cooking—“Eggs for Egducators and Nurishment for Nurses”—on a grill beside a parked pickup truck. A small child darted up and snatched a piece of bacon from the griddle, to everyone’s laughter. Crystal Cruz, a parent with a fifth grader at Colfax and an eighth grader at Walter Reed, told me, “Not everyone can be a teacher. It takes a great deal of patience and fortitude. It takes love for someone else’s children. It takes a lot of resources and talent and time. It is a lot of energy to teach any number of kids in a class, but if you have got 25, that is one thing. If you have got 35, it is a whole other animal.”

Cruz had come out for the teachers, she said, because, “They deserve every respect. They also deserve the financial support. They deserve everything that they are asking for.”

On January 22nd, Cruz’s wishes for the teachers came true. After morning pickets that were joined by Los Angeles firefighters and still more community members, the UTLA held a press conference with Mayor Eric Garcetti and the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) board superintendent, Austin Beutner, to announce that a tentative agreement had been reached to end the strike. The deal included a 6 percent raise for educators; a reduction in class sizes; a nurse in every school; more funding for librarians, counselors, and wraparound services; a 50 percent reduction in the amount of standardized testing; and more. The union also managed to beat back a two-tier health-care system, while the Board of Education agreed to pursue a cap on charter schools and additional state funding. And the mayor promised to endorse the Schools and Communities First statewide ballot initiative for 2020, which would reform California’s infamous Proposition 13, raising property taxes on corporations to raise money for schools and more.

The look on UTLA president Alex Caputo-Pearl’s face as he announced the contents of the agreement was that of a man who knows his side has won, though he was careful to note that no agreement was final until members got a chance to vote on it. “We are a democratic union,” he told the gathered reporters, explaining that the members would return to their school sites to read the contract and to vote on it using the same structures that had been built to get immediate feedback from the picket lines to union headquarters every day.

In the end, a supermajority of UTLA members voted to approve the agreement that Caputo-Pearl called “Not a narrow labor agreement, but a broad compact.” And indeed, the final deal touched not only on the narrow wages and benefits issues that are so often assumed to be the basis of labor struggles but also on the kinds of far-ranging social and racial justice concerns that have turned teachers’ unions into a full-fledged political movement.

UTLA won its demands after years of reform within the union and in the wake of unrest among teachers nationwide. But most important, the teachers won because of deep, solid community support, mutual organizing, and a sense of shared fate that brought many more people to the streets than there were teachers in the union—60,000 on the Friday before the marathon bargaining weekend that produced the contract. Crystal Cruz was one of these people, as was Amy Schur of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, or ACCE, one of many organizations that had worked side by side with the teachers in their struggle. “The greatest victory is the power we’ve built through labor and community uniting around a long-term economic, racial and social justice agenda and plan,” said Schur.

Cheyenne McLaren, a student at King/Drew Medical Magnet High and a member of Students Deserve, was another of these fired-up allies. She joined actions last week that ventured beyond the picket line, into the hills, and out to Santa Monica to visit the homes of school-board president Mónica García and superintendent Beutner. “We have a whole plan to get [García] to agree to our demands and see that we are not backing down,” McLaren said at the time. “A lot of people out here are angry.”

McLaren’s organization is part of an even larger group, the Reclaim Our Schools LA coalition, which brings together Students Deserve, ACCE and other community organizations, UTLA, and others to demand funding and support for the schools that serve their neighborhoods. It was Reclaim Our Schools that coordinated the vans and cars to bring over 100 members to the doorsteps of decision-makers like García and Beutner with letters of demands; when the two of them refused to answer their doors, the group held speak-outs on their doorsteps. Outside of Beutner’s gate in Pacific Palisades, the crowd sang “The community is calling” while holding electric candles, as if for a vigil, though the tone was more angry than sad.

“I found out that we had our nurse one day a week and I went to war!” one mother declared. “I have one biological child at that school and 588 adopted children at that school.”

It was that sense—shared by community members and teachers alike—that the children of LA’s public schools are all of their children that animated this strike and made it successful. As Peg Cagle, a math teacher at Reseda High School, said of the weeklong swirl of protest: “After decades of feeling invisible, the fact that you really feel like you are being heard, that your voice is rising above the fold, if you will—you have got a possibility that somehow, somebody, might be listening and somebody might actually pay attention.”

Solidarity doesn’t happen overnight. Despite the elegant—and seemingly effortless—choreography between educators, students, parents, community groups, and even local businesses, the display of community-labor force that rocked LA for more than a week was years in the making, and remarkable in both its breadth and depth. To Amy Schur, who has spent years working in “community-labor” partnerships, this fight “was an incredible example of a union going beyond the rhetoric of working with the community, and actually joining in coalition with parent and community groups as true partners in a long-term fight to save public education.” Because of that real partnership, she said, the victories at the bargaining table were shared by community as well as teachers.

I met Rosa Jimenez in the pouring rain on the fourth morning of the strike, outside of Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in Koreatown, where she teaches history. She told me—as teachers danced on the picket line to “Proud Mary” and chanted, “We’re soaking wet and really cold! LA schools will not be sold!”—that “everyone is clear about why we’re here.” The organizing and preparation the union had engaged in for months had paid off in an understanding, she said, that, “This is much bigger than us, than our union, even our city. Those of us who work with low-income students of color, we see every day that our students need much more than what they get.”

Jimenez works closely with Reclaim Our Schools LA and with Students Deserve; she was with the students who spoke outside of Beutner’s home, and she was with allies from UNITE HERE when they organized a march from her school to a nearby hotel where the hotel workers were battling for a contract. The students in particular, she said, were inspired by Black Lives Matter’s divest/invest framework, which calls for resources to be taken from policing and prisons and put into schools and community services, and their demands were brought into the union’s bargaining and were won at the table: The union won funding from the district for an immigrant-defense fund, with a dedicated hotline and attorney, and a new program to end random searches in schools.

Those victories “seem little in the scope of things,” Jimenez said, but the district had claimed not long ago that the union could not bargain these issues at all and had even tried to get an injunction against them. “Then we ended up winning on these things. I think it shows the power we had behind us, the parent and student support.”

Jimenez teaches at a school that is seen as a model for the kind of community schools that UTLA and its allies have fought for. What that means, she said, is “teaching curriculum that is culturally relevant, student-centered, and that it is democratically run.” Parents, she said, are involved with decision-making, and students are active participants. The school is also bilingual. “We really have created a place where parents come in and they are with kids in the space until they have to go to class. A lot of parents volunteer.”

Being a community school includes being multicultural and anti-racist, she added. In the age of Trump, that, in turn, has meant considering what it would mean to be a sanctuary school, one that is free of police and ICE so students feel safe—many students, Jimenez said, join the school after leaving immigration detention—as well as a school that could be a hub for organizing in the community. The new contract provides for 30 more community schools like RFK, which Jimenez said was a key demand of Reclaim Our Schools and Students Deserve, and an alternative to the privately-run charters.

“I think it’s huge and it’s really going to change the conversation about what is possible in contract negotiations,” Jimenez said. “It is possible to take on these privatizing forces and it is possible to win and possible to change the narrative. More people are talking about what is at the root of the problems we have in the schools.”

Still, it would be an illusion to suggest that any of this was easy. The community alliances, the solidarity between teachers and students, the support of parents and families, and, of course, the victory—all of this took years of dedicated, patient organizing. And it required real sacrifice, above all by teachers who gave up their pay and risked their jobs to strike—and ultimately won the contract.

“I had this moment this week where I realized, ‘I am also doing this for myself as a worker, as a working-class person, as a single mom,’” Jimenez said, tears in her eyes. “This is actually not that easy for me. I am not getting paid. I am actually also sacrificing. It is okay to say, ‘This is also for me, too.’”

Sarah Jaffe is a fellow at Type Media Center and the author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt (Nation Books).

Full Transcript Of Angela Davis’s Women’s March Speech

Women's March on Washington

By Lyndsey Matthews

Elle.com

Jan 21, 2017 – Civil rights activist Angela Davis spoke at the Women’s March on Washington on Saturday in front of a crowd of hundreds of thousands who gathered in the nation’s capital to protest the Trump administration. Davis, who is known for writing such books as Women, Race, and Class, made a passionate call for resistance and asked the audience to become more militant in their demands for social justice over the next four years of Trump’s presidency.

Read the transcript of the speech in its entirety here:

"At a challenging moment in our history, let us remind ourselves that we the hundreds of thousands, the millions of women, trans-people, men and youth who are here at the Women’s March, we represent the powerful forces of change that are determined to prevent the dying cultures of racism, hetero-patriarchy from rising again.

"We recognize that we are collective agents of history and that history cannot be deleted like web pages. We know that we gather this afternoon on indigenous land and we follow the lead of the first peoples who despite massive genocidal violence have never relinquished the struggle for land, water, culture, their people. We especially salute today the Standing Rock Sioux.

"The freedom struggles of black people that have shaped the very nature of this country’s history cannot be deleted with the sweep of a hand. We cannot be made to forget that black lives do matter. This is a country anchored in slavery and colonialism, which means for better or for worse the very history of the United States is a history of immigration and enslavement. Spreading xenophobia, hurling accusations of murder and rape and building walls will not erase history.

"No human being is illegal.

"The struggle to save the planet, to stop climate change, to guarantee the accessibility of water from the lands of the Standing Rock Sioux, to Flint, Michigan, to the West Bank and Gaza. The struggle to save our flora and fauna, to save the air—this is ground zero of the struggle for social justice.

"This is a women’s march and this women’s march represents the promise of feminism as against the pernicious powers of state violence. And inclusive and intersectional feminism that calls upon all of us to join the resistance to racism, to Islamophobia, to anti-Semitism, to misogyny, to capitalist exploitation.

"Yes, we salute the fight for 15. We dedicate ourselves to collective resistance. Resistance to the billionaire mortgage profiteers and gentrifiers. Resistance to the health care privateers. Resistance to the attacks on Muslims and on immigrants. Resistance to attacks on disabled people. Resistance to state violence perpetrated by the police and through the prison industrial complex. Resistance to institutional and intimate gender violence, especially against trans women of color.

"Women’s rights are human rights all over the planet and that is why we say freedom and justice for Palestine. We celebrate the impending release of Chelsea Manning. And Oscar López Rivera. But we also say free Leonard Peltier. Free Mumia Abu-Jamal. Free Assata Shakur.

"Over the next months and years we will be called upon to intensify our demands for social justice to become more militant in our defense of vulnerable populations. Those who still defend the supremacy of white male hetero-patriarchy had better watch out.

"The next 1,459 days of the Trump administration will be 1,459 days of resistance: Resistance on the ground, resistance in the classrooms, resistance on the job, resistance in our art and in our music.

"This is just the beginning and in the words of the inimitable Ella Baker, ‘We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.’ Thank you."

Case in Point: Intersection of Race, Class and Gender

Georgia Woman Faces Murder Charges for Taking Pill that Allegedly Killed Fetus

[Editor’s Update: After three days in jail, the changes were dropped, but the outrage remains.]

By Lauren Gambino
The Guardian via Alternet

June 10, 2015 – A Georgia woman is facing a murder charge in the death of a five-and-a-half-month-old fetus she delivered after she allegedly took a pill that terminated her pregnancy.

Officials have charged Kenlissia Jones, 23, of Albany, Georgia, with malice murder and possession of a dangerous drug, according to local [3] news [4] reports. She was arrested on Saturday night after giving birth to the fetus in a car on the way to the hospital and taken to nearby Dougherty County jail, where she is being held without bond.

Pro-choice advocates said there was no abortion clinic nearby and that initial reports of the young woman’s arrest were “deeply disturbing” in the wake of so-called “feticide” – killing a fetus – laws sweeping the US.

According to a police report obtained by the Associated Press, a county social services worker called Albany police to the hospital, and told officers that Jones ingested four pills she purchased online to “induce labor”. The social services worker told the police Jones wished to end her pregnancy because she and her boyfriend had broken up.

Jones’s neighbor drove her to the hospital, but she gave birth to the fetus before they arrived. Officials said the fetus died at the hospital about half an hour after she gave birth, according to the report, which did not indicate how far along Jones was in her pregnancy.

WALB-TV reported earlier that authorities had said the woman was five and a half months pregnant.

The Dougherty County district attorney, Greg Edwards, reportedly said the case is likely to be presented to a grand jury, and that prosecutors needed time to explore their options under state and federal law.

Albany police refused to answer questions about the case, citing an open investigation and directing all calls to the Dougherty County district attorney’s office. The office did not return multiple requests for comment by the Guardian.

“If women do not have the means to access medical care, they will take matters into their own hands, with tragic consequences,” said Jaime Chandra, a spokeswoman for the Feminist Women’s Health [5] Center in Atlanta.

More than 50% of women in Georgia live in a county with no abortion clinic, and this is true of Dougherty County and nearly all of south-west Georgia, according to the Health Center.

Cytotec, a misoprostol drug, can be used in combination with another drug – mifepristone – to end a pregnancy non-surgically, a method known as medical abortion. It was not immediately clear to the Guardian whether Jones took the first pill, or only Cytotec, which by itself is not considered a so-called “abortion pill”.

There were 28 abortion providers in Georgia in 2011, down from 32 in 2008,according to the Guttmacher Institute [6]. A full 96% of counties in the state had no abortion clinic in 2011, which would require more than half of all Georgia women to travel outside their county to receive an abortion. Chandra said she is unaware of an abortion clinic in or around Albany.
Purvi Patel case: legal experts warn on reproductive rights in Indiana Read more

Elizabeth Nash, a state policy expert at the Guttmacher Institute, said reports on the Georgia case were “deeply disturbing” and that she was alarmed at what appears to be a spike in the number of cases in which women are charged with crimes for self-aborting their fetus. Criminalizing abortion discourages women from seeking the medical care they may need, she said.

“You could imagine a woman might not go to the hospital if she thinks she is going to be arrested,” Nash said.

Currently, at least 38 US states [7] – including Georgia – have fetal homicide laws, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The first person convicted in the US under such a law is Purvi Patel, an Indiana woman serving 20 years in prison [8] for ending her own pregnancy using abortion drugs in July 2013.

In Georgia, the penalty for “feticide” is life in prison.

“The woman wasn’t able to access healthcare when she needed it, she took action on her own and then when she sought out healthcare she was then arrested,” Nash said. “She was let down every step of the way.”

Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/lauren-gambino
[2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/
[3] http://www.walb.com/story/29263746/official-5-month-old-fetus-lived-30-minutes-after-abortion-pill-delivery
[4] http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/abortion-pill-leads-murder-charge-fetus-dies-31630905
[5] http://www.theguardian.com/society/health
[6] https://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/sfaa/georgia.html
[7] http://www.ncsl.org/research/health/fetal-homicide-state-laws.aspx
[8] http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/02/purvi-patel-case-alter-reproductive-rights-indiana
[9] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on Georgia Woman Faces Murder Charges for Taking Pill that Allegedly Killed Fetus
[10] http://www.alternet.org/
[11] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B