What are we fighting for?

Since the 2019 OEA strike, we continue to see stagnating wages, neglected facilities, high vacancy rates, and rapid teacher turnover. COVID has exacerbated social inequalities, leading to increased violence against our students and families. Our district bosses pay lip service to social justice, but the reality is the opposite: they are making things worse. The top OUSD managers and most of the School Board directors have been plugged in by the corporate education industry, whose agenda is austerity for us and profits for them. Especially since the 2003 state takeover, OUSD’s top managers are operating hand in glove with billionaires and privatizer groups: closing public schools (especially those serving Black and Brown students), opening charters, privatizing education services, and further gentrifying the city.

As educators, we know that improvement begins with reflecting and learning from the past. The history of public education is contradictory: schools are seen as engines of social mobility, but in many ways they serve to solidify inequality though class, race, and gender divisions. Public schools exist because working-class people fought to be included in education. But the ruling class has always molded the education system to serve its purpose: training working-class youth to be obedient workers, while training the children of the rich to be managers and bosses. Since the advent of public schools, the struggle has continued for schools to serve women and people of color, and for a curriculum that represents the oppressed, not just the rich and powerful. Since the 70s, however, there has been a global rollback in workers’ gains (neoliberalism). We are now in the midst of this vicious rebound of the capitalists who want to make their profits great again. The only way to stop the billionaires’ attacks and win better conditions for our students is collective action by us, the workers.

The first tool we have for fighting the bosses is unions. But just as schools can be either emancipatory or oppressive (or have elements of both), unions do not always represent the interests of workers, despite the lip service of union officials. In a society that excludes the majority from any meaningful influence on public policy, it is natural for unions to gravitate towards the same top-down structure where members just pay dues and hope for the best. However, the history of labor struggles shows that unions fight for the workers only when they are democratically run by the workers themselves. Even the rights and protections we have today were won through strikes and other job actions involving the majority of the workforce, not by passive trust in union leaders.

The purpose of the Rank and File Caucus is to make OEA a truly democratic and fighting union—driven and controlled by the members from the bottom up. Early in the COVID pandemic, we held town halls attended by hundreds to organize for COVID safety and later helped organize actions for extended COVID sick leave. We initiated and helped organize the one-day strike in April 2022 against privatization with the Longshore Workers Union (ILWU Local 10), which has better positioned us to negotiate against the district management, which routinely ride roughshod over OEA.

We want a union that shows bully admins they cannot intimidate us. We want corporate interests out of our district. We want to replace the privatizers in OUSD management with administrators who are accountable to the workers and families they are supposed to serve. We want no school closures, no privatization of education services, smaller class sizes, a living wage for all education workers, adequate facilities, and much more support staff to address the deep social inequities our students face. We envision an OEA that fights not just for marginally better contracts, but for common good demands and for social justice. History shows that deep changes can only come from wide collective action and fighting unions, not lobbying and tweeting. Join us!