Standing with the Teachers Union

One of the cultural aftershocks of the pandemic trauma is a remarkable spike in union action in the U.S. The fact that about a third of the American workforce was laid off during the covid crisis awakened a widespread mobilization of young people in the service sector and in public sector workers. They woke up to the precarity of life in late-stage capitalism, where the so-called essential workers have been stripped of a say over their future by a callous oligarchic elite who regard them as disposable economic units. 

In that light, the dramatic uptick in union militancy is a sign of life. That means that the next generation still has faith in their own agency to reclaim the future on better terms. The announcement by the Sonoma Valley Teachers Association (SVTA) that they are nearly unanimous in authorizing a strike cheered me up. That is an assertion of class power that seemed like it had been beaten out of us over the past few decades. 

Crisis provokes new formations out of chaos. These moments of punctuated evolution under stress are how structural political change occurs, historically. Let’s hope that the Wall Street plan to deploy the Federal Reserve to induce a recession via interest rate hikes to crush the aspirations of the working class by creating enough desperation and immiseration to tame labor power fails.

The SVTA action took me by surprise, perhaps because I’ve never had children and don’t tune into school board politics. I’ve wondered for years why these hyper-local education politics drew so much heat when the stakes seemed so low. What woke me up and compelled me to engage in my first SVUSD meeting ever in March of this year was the public punishment of trustee John Kelly over negotiating a PLA (Project Labor Agreement) with the North Bay Building and Construction Trades Council. 

The PLA is the gold standard of public works construction management, a proven method for getting big projects done on time and on budget. But four trustees caved to pressure from anti-union ‘free market’ fundamentalists to rescind the PLA.

I will work diligently to defeat the board members responsible for this travesty. Two of the ‘gang of four’ who censured trustee Kelly for doing the right thing are not seeking another term. Trustees Anne Ching (Area 5), and Troy Knox (Area 4) are up for re-election in 2024 and they will be held accountable for their lack of judgment if they choose to seek another term.

 That ideologically driven stunt cost the district over $100K in legal fees. Who wants to work with a bureaucratic body that reneges on legal contracts? The superintendent seems clueless: SVUSD Superintendent Palazuelos said he was concerned with construction costs and the declining availability of skilled labor workers. Oh really? The North Bay Building Trades have all the skilled workers they need. They would have got the job done. 

The SVTA union representative zeroed in on the root of the problem: The money is there for teachers’ salaries – the district and the board are choosing to spend the money elsewhere, the statement reads, adding that SVUSD spends 7% less than the average on teachers’ wages but 7% more than the average on expenses such as consultants and lawyers.

Busting the union with an expensive ideologically-driven lawsuit, which will likely fail, was apparently more important than delivering on the voter-approved project. The SVUSD board needs a shakeup.