Organizing from the Ground
02-26-2020 Sarah Jaffe
This essay is a transcription of Sarah Jaffe's talk at the HAC Annual Conference, "Citizenship and Civil Disobedience," and was first published in HA: The Journal, Vol VII.
We’re here to talk about organizing on the ground. I actually wrote a book about that subject, which I’m going to plug shamelessly.1 I could talk about many, many different examples of organizing and how that builds and sustains social movements; I’m sure we’ll get into many more of them in the Q&A, and I’m happy to answer questions about anyone that you can think of.
I wanted to talk today about teacher strikes, because it’s my favorite subject and because we’re in the middle of a massive teacher strike wave. That provides me a great opportunity to talk about organizing and history and how all of these things are used to build and sustain the movements that we see and that we often assume are spontaneous.
Last year teachers in West Virginia began to walk out of the classroom, in February. That led to strikes, statewide strikes, across West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, strikes in Colorado, North Carolina, and Kentucky. This year, the school year started with strikes across the state of Washington; a strike in East Strasburg, Pennsylvania, that I went and visited recently; and strike votes in Seattle and Los Angeles. Seattle has settled; Los Angeles is in mediation, meaning we could soon see teachers on strike in the second-largest school district in the country, the largest being New York City, where it is illegal for teachers to strike, for all public employees to strike in fact. I will get back to those laws at some point, I am sure.
But I want to start out by talking about what a strike is, because a strike is not a protest. A strike is something very specific. It is the withdrawal of your labor in order to stop the functioning of your workplace or a system. It is a very specific way to disrupt the functioning of an institution, to demonstrate your power. In the case of teachers, it is to demonstrate the fact that, if teachers stop going to work, the entire school system shuts down. It screws up a lot of people’s lives because their kids are now not at school. It throws a wrench into everybody’s day-to-day functioning, and, it turns out, when you can organize that across an entire state, you can effectively force a hostile governor and a hostile state legislature to do what you want—i.e., vote a 5 percent raise for every public employee in the State of West Virginia.
I write about labor. This is my favorite thing to do. It was not a very popular thing to try to be a labor journalist about ten years ago. And then people started going on strike, and suddenly people are calling me, going, “Hey, can you write a thing that explains this to people?” Because strikes were out of fashion in this country. Strikes had dropped off since the 1980s, when, famously, Ronald Reagan broke the air traffic controller strike. And if you pull up a strike frequency chart it drops right off in about 1982. So the revival of the strike among teachers, among public school teachers and particularly among public school teachers in what we think of now as red states, is significant for a lot of reasons. One is that we’re seeing strikes at all. Two is that teachers in particular are challenging the narrative of austerity that we have been fed for a while, but particularly since the 2008 financial crisis; they are challenging the idea that it is overpaid public employees who caused the crisis, and not an out-of-control financial industry.
Teachers in these particular states that got a lot of attention last year are in states without strong unions, in some cases without any legal protections for their unions, without any right to collective bargaining at all, and they still managed to organize statewide strikes. We heard a lot already this morning about how social media is bad for you. I will just counter that with saying that the West Virginia strike started in a Facebook group; the Arizona strike started in a Facebook group. And what we’ve seen with social movements, again in the era of social media, is that they spread like things do on the internet; they go viral, they get replicated, and this is true of a lot of different movements. What happened with these strikes is that they did indeed go viral, and people replicated the way that they were done. They made Facebook groups; they started having walkouts, protests, built up to getting every county in their state to go on strike.
These are strikes across multiple unions in many cases. These are strikes of largely workers who are not members of unions. In most of these states a majority of the teachers were not members of unions; but nevertheless they all managed to go on strike, demonstrating the thing that I call the Newsies Rule. You’ve seen the musical Newsies, or the Disney movie, where the lead characters says, “If we strike, then we’re a union.”
These strikes seemed spontaneous, they seemed quick; they were organized in a Facebook group. But there were two things at the roots of these particular strikes, and this started in West Virginia: the counties that went out on strike first in West Virginia were the mining counties. It was Mingo County, Wyoming County. These were the places where the mine wars were fought. We heard a lot about violence in the previous panel, and I could talk a lot more about the violent history of how labor unions were formed in this country. People died, a lot of them in some cases. There were actual shoot-outs. There’s a wonderful movie called Matewan that you can watch if you’re interested in the history of the mine wars, because what happened, sometimes you had state violence, sometimes you had private security violence—some folks called the Pinkertons shot a lot of miners back in the day.
This history is not that old. This goes back to before the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which governs labor relations in this country; although at this point the legal regime behind it has basically been dismantled. And again, these were violent, violent struggles against capital. When you’re talking to teachers in West Virginia, you have teachers who have parents and grandparents who were in the mines, people who remember this. They don’t just remember it because they saw a movie; they remember it because it happened to their grandfather, and that is deep in this memory, that this is how you have power: you go on strike and you stop the workings of the machine until you get some sort of fair treatment from the boss.
The other, more recent history that led up to these strikes starts in 2011, and it starts in Wisconsin, and it starts with, number one, austerity—blaming teachers and public workers for the state of the economy after the financial crisis. When Scott Walker was elected governor of Wisconsin, he pushed forward a law that took collective bargaining rights away from public sector employees, and he thought that he wasn’t going to get much pushback. And then suddenly—well, first it started out with the graduate students. Since I’m at a university I’ve got to give a shout-out to the Teaching Assistants Association at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who started the protests. And then more people came, and then more people came, and suddenly there were twenty thousand, thirty thousand people camping out in the Wisconsin state capitol. There are wonderful videos you can find on YouTube, pictures you can see of people wearing red with the State of Wisconsin on their shirts, flooding the capitol. And when you saw the pictures from West Virginia, Oklahoma. One of the things that the movement was called among teachers this year was Red for Ed. Everybody wore red and showed up at the state capitol. And you look at this, and you go, Ohhh, I’ve seen this before.
The other thing specifically among teachers’ unions was the Chicago Teachers Union strike in 2012. What happened successfully first in Chicago was that a group of teachers within their union decided that the union was not doing its job very well, and they organized a caucus, and they took power in the union, and they managed to clear a very high threshold for a strike vote, and they went on strike, and they brought, in this case, a hostile Democratic administration to the bargaining table—and won.
Since Chicago there have been reform caucuses like this all over the country. Some have succeeded in taking power; some have just succeeded in challenging the leadership to become more militant, to make demands, to take strike votes, to be willing to go on strike—in places like Los Angeles, which you might see on strike very soon; in Massachusetts; there’s a caucus here in New York; there is the St. Paul Federation of Teachers, Seattle; many others.
This is all what’s been feeding into the thing that we see and experience in the pages of major publications as a spontaneous eruption of teacher militancy across the country. This is also under the broader context of, again, austerity narratives, of both parties being willing to say that it’s teachers’ fault that public schools are “failing,” the push for charter schools, etc., etc. And so: strikes. Strikes are dramatic, strikes get headlines, strikes win.
But after the strike you have to go back to the subject of this talk, which is organizing from the ground. In so many of these states they’re out of the headlines, but they’re organizing, adding members, changing how they think about making and taking power, wielding power. All of these things are still in the works, and so we don’t know exactly where the next eruption is going to be; but I can tell you that there’s going to be one.
1. Sarah Jaffe, Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt (New York: Nation Books, 2016).