Build Solidarity with Other Workers, Disrupt Corporate Power Behind Austerity and Privatization

Many OEA members have joined in the organizing to prepare for our Unfair Labor Practice strike now set to begin May 4. Some have focused on creating solidarity schools (aka strike schools) to minimize harm to students and families that could occur if schools shut down near the end of the academic year.

The California Teachers Association (CTA) is reportedly unwilling to provide liability insurance for solidarity schools. CTA, which gets 55% of our dues dollars,  provided that coverage during the 2019 strike, so why not now?  We have not heard an official explanation, but over the years some CTA staff have dismissed solidarity schools as counterproductive, because they make the strike easier on families, and therefore (so the argument goes) reduce public pressure on the district to bargain with the union.

Obviously strikes must be disruptive to succeed, but we want to make our actions hurt the bosses, not other working people! On the contrary, we need to build solidarity among all who share a common interest in quality public education: school workers, students, families and all working class folks in Oakland. That is the logic of strike schools and what helps us build pressure on the District. On the other hand, the “logic” of inflicting pain on students and families to get them to pressure the District to bargain with OEA reminds us of an analysis by CTA staffers leading a workshop for bargaining teams in October 2009.  Here are detailed notes taken at that workshop. (Warning: If you’re not familiar with CTA’s politics, you may find them a bit shocking.)

At that workshop, CTA staff advised bargaining team members to tell their District officials to lay off teachers and other school workers and cut programs, rather than cut teachers’ pay and benefits. Doing so would “keep our members whole” (aside from new teachers getting kicked to the curb) and make the public “feel the pinch and tug” of program and staffing cuts. Only then, could we persuade them to support increased taxes for public schools.

CTA’s strategically and morally bankrupt approach helps explain the weakness of OEA (and many other teacher unions in California and the U.S.). Instead of aggressively organizing with parents and other school workers to fight for our common interests, we rely on “partnership” with an extremely hostile employer to manage the unacceptable. 

For example, when asked why we weren’t talking about organizing with other unions and community organizations to campaign for a bailout of public schools and services, a CTA staffer at the bargaining workshop answered, “this isn’t the right time” for that, because the public wasn’t yet feeling the pinch. This assessment came in the midst of growing public anger over the multi-trillion dollar banks bailout that sparked the Occupy movement two years later.  When would “the right time” come, if this wasn’t it? (CTA waited for Occupy to spread worldwide before endorsing it, then jumped off the bandwagon to abruptly withdraw its support for the 2012 California Millionaire’s Tax ballot initiative.)

Here was the CTA staffer’s alternative to “unrealistic” efforts to redistribute corporate wealth to fully fund quality public schools: “If we have effective relationships on the local level, we should build on local relationships to try to de-escalate the fighting. For example, get together with the district and work to sponsor a school bond. Or work with educational reform stuff, for example Race to the Top [the Obama administration’s program to aggressively promote charter schools].”

The same official praised CTA’s proposal to create a charter school district in Richmond/West Contra Costa County School District, which he said would consist of “pure start-up, teacher-run charters.” And he said that the reason for Richmond’s notoriously low teacher compensation was because the District had been “fiscally irresponsible for closing only eight schools since 1992 instead of 25 like they were told to do.”

Returning to the present need for our strike to be disruptive—How can we maximize and target disruption effectively to win as quickly as possible, while building support among all of our allies? Effectively shutting down all public schools in the District is only the beginning of that effort.  The power of a teachers strike is primarily political, not economic. (School districts usually don’t lose attendance revenue [ADA] during a strike, because Ed Code allows them to use either the current or prior school year’s ADA for revenue calculations.) 

Our leverage during a strike depends on our ability to escalate pressure with additional actions to disrupt powerful political and economic players who, in turn, will exert pressure on the District. Here are a few such entities:

• The Port of Oakland, through which $51 billion of cargo passed in 2019.  
• Shorenstein, a real estate investment firm, with $9.5 billion in assets nationwide. It has helped drive gentrification and privatization in Oakland, including the development City Center—four privately owned city blocks in the heart of downtown.  
• Oakland-based Clorox, a Fortune 500 corporation
•  “Not-for-profit” Kaiser Permanente, which would rank #34 (in 2022) on Fortune’s list of richest corporations. 

None of these corporations pays a single tax dollar to support Oakland public schools.  

Around the time that CTA was counseling locals to aggressively collaborate with neoliberal policies of austerity and cuts, OEA, SEIU 1021, and Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) went the opposite way. They mobilized actions, including civil disobedience, at banks and corporate offices in Oakland to demand a “bail out” for public schools and services, not banks and corporations. And the three largest District unions (OEA, SEIU and AFSCME) sent a joint letter to Kaiser Permanente demanding that it freeze its premium rates for OUSD workers. In 2010-11, Kaiser did just that for a year.  

What leverage might our strike quickly gain if we were to sit in at the offices of Shorenstein Properties LLC (601 City Center), Clorox (headquartered at City Center), and/or the Kaiser Center (300 Lakeside Drive)?  Hmmm...