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Teachers and Staff Across the Country Prove that Getting Organized and Going on Strike Works!

Business as usual in this country has been disrupted as a historic teacher strike wave has spread from West Virginia to Oklahoma. Teachers have gone on strike (all in supposedly-conservative states).

Teachers demonstrate in W. Virginia
It began in West Virginia on February 22, after Governor Justice signed legislation giving teachers a 2% pay increase. Teachers knew that this was inadequate to cover living costs and did not address other concerns, such as the long-time, intentional underfunding of public schools. With the support of parents and students, teachers and school staff shut down schools in all 55 counties for nine days. The teachers reached an agreement with the state, resulting in a 5% raise for all state workers and a freeze on raising health insurance costs.

Similar strikes have occurred in Kentucky, Arizona, Oklahoma, and Colorado. In most of these states, it is “illegal” for public sector workers to go on strike. These teachers, are setting an incredible example of courage and determination. All workers—the poor, the oppressed, the unemployed, and imprisoned—can learn from this struggle. When the people get organized and act in unison, major change is possible.

The Latest on Oklahoma
The Oklahoma strike ended on April 11, after nearly two weeks. Oklahoma has been undergoing a crisis of education, as teachers have left the state in recent years due to low wages and underfunded schools where students have been forced to use battered, outdated textbooks and only attend school four days out of the week. The strike has forced the state legislature to raise oil taxes, bringing in $450 million for education. On average, teachers will receive a raise of $6,100 per year as a result of the new funding.

Teachers in Louisiana resist, too
Educators, school staff, students and families face terrible conditions in Louisiana–both in New Orleans and throughout the state. In January, Deyshia Hargrave, a middle school teacher in Vermillion Parish, made national news.
Hargrave stood up at a school board meeting and asked about teacher salaries, saying “I have a serious issue with a superintendent or any person in a position of leadership getting any type of raise. It’s a slap in the face to all the teachers, cafeteria workers, or any other support staff we have. We work very hard with very little to maintain the salaries that we have…We’re doing the work. The students are doing the work. At the top, that’s not where kids learn. It’s in the classroom.”

As a result, Hargrave was handcuffed and removed. Hargrave was not charged, and because of her courage, she received massive support online. A mass rally of educators and supporters was also held in Abbeville. Hargrave was one of the main speakers.

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Police Murders Continue Non-Stop. We Must Demand Justice.

By Gabriel Mangano

The police murders of working class and oppressed people continues without end, rising to 277 by early April.

Especially targeted are African Americans who are 31% of police murder victims but 60% of unarmed victims. In Brooklyn, 4 police shot Saheed Vassel, a mentally ill Jamaican immigrant, 10 times within 10 seconds of confronting him. He was holding only a showerhead and was known as harmless and helpful to people throughout his neighborhood. Demonstrators demanded justice and condemned the lack of mental health services.

In late March, police in Sacramento, CA shot Stephon Clark, a 22-year old father of two, 8 times in the side and back in his grandmother’s back yard. He was holding a cell phone. Thousands demonstrated against this murder blocking freeways and forcing the cancellation of two NBA games. And in Louisiana, right-wing state Attorney General Jeff Landry refused to indict the cop who murdered Alton Sterling. Even after a video shows Officer Salamoni telling Mr. Sterling that he would murder him if he moved, he was not jailed, just fired.

As of yet none of these murderers have been indicted.

In California, state legislators proposed a law that would change when lethal force can be used to “only when necessary” from “when reasonable”. All this will change, however, is the language the police will use to justify their killings.
Since the murder of Trayvon Martin, millions of people have demanded justice for these police and vigilante killings. And many reforms have been proposed and put into practice. However, all of these reforms are doomed to failure. For example, civilian review boards have been highly touted as a way to control brutal “bad apples”. Yet after years of struggle, the Newark, New Jersey civilian review board was effectively broken by a judge’s injunction restricting its subpoena and investigatory powers. Body cameras are another minimal solution that has proven unworkable as police routinely turn them off. As well, district attorneys often fail to indict, and juries rarely convict those who are indicted despite overwhelming graphic evidence of what would clearly be murder for anyone but a cop.

These reforms and other false cures cannot succeed because they are based on the lie that the police are here to serve and protect everyone equally. The role of the police is to serve and protect the ruling class, the owners and their property. And they can only do this by reigning terror on working class and minority communities. The rich know they stole their wealth from our labor, and they will use every means to keep us down.

While the revolutionary workers know that these reforms, although they may save a few lives, will not solve the problem of police terror and that the murder of working class men and women will continue unabated, we still fight for these reforms. Only in this way can we expose the rottenness of the capitalist system and the murderous thugs who help protect it. Only the overthrow of capitalism can finally end this plague on working and oppressed people.

Black mothers and babies die at more than double the rate of white mothers and babies.

Criminal racism, cuts to healthcare are to blame.

Black Lives Matter

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Workers Deserve Reliable Transportation Now

After a full day of work, I begin the trek through the rain to find a way to get home. It’s the Saturday before Mardi Gras day and I am shuffling through the aftermath of the city’s and tourist’s elaborate celebration. There is so much garbage in the streets, so many beads littering the sidewalks as water builds up in the poorly pumped streets, that it is hard to walk through the Quarter.
I join my fellow workers waiting at the S. Rampart and Canal bus stop and lean against the building wall in hopes to find shelter from the rain. I am waiting for about 10 minutes while no bus arrives before I see city workers putting barricades on Canal. A woman comes over and laughs at us for thinking there would be bus service for us workers, despite the fact that we had just worked long days serving up the food, drink, and entertainment expected of Mardi Gras weekend. She points us a couple blocks over and says that “some” buses are waiting over there.

Since paying for a taxi or a Lyft/Uber would cost my day’s wages, I start swiftly walking. Random buses are scattered throughout Elk Pl. and Basin St., and from a distance I can almost make out the number 88 on one of them. Although the RTA’s timetable said the next bus (the previous never came) wasn’t due to leave for another 5 minutes, before I can get to it, the bus takes off. I am left stranded in the rain with my entire day’s cash earnings in my back pocket.

Tired, wet, and stranded, I feel so much frustration that this is not the first time the RTA has failed workers who hold up the city’s economy. Random detours, service disruptions, and buses or street cars that just never come are common.

On a typical day I wait up to 40 minutes for a street car on the St. Charles line, multiple times every month the Canal streetcar line has unwarranted service disruptions. Almost every day the 5 bus is 10-20 minutes late, resulting in me being late to work.

The feeling of anxiety and stress I felt when my feet couldn’t carry me fast enough to make the 88 at an unpredictable time is one I and thousands of workers feel everyday. Many buses don’t come often enough and if they decide to leave early, people are left stranded for another hour or more. In that hour’s time, you could be fired from your job, miss a class or an appointment, miss valuable time with your child, or be late to get home to cook a meal or help with homework.

This is not to mention that there are almost no shelters to cover us from the elements, and that there are less than half the amount of routes than we had pre-Katrina. We walk far distances at all hours of the day and night to get to a bus that just might not ever come. During hurricane warnings and floods, we are still expected to show up to work on time, without reliable transportation.
Yet the RTA funds $75 million streetcar projects like the Rampart Line that actually decrease bus service and access to jobs. They spend $20,000 on a ribbon-cutting ceremony and tell the workers that they don’t have money for more buses.

Hospitality workers generate $7.5 billion for the city, yet we spend hours every single day taking inefficient transit. We spend most of our time being exploited at our jobs where many of us cater to tourists, just to take “public” transportation that is not meant to serve the public. We are pushed out of the downtown area due to rising rents, yet we have no means of reliable transportation to-and-from our jobs. The workers of this city deserve free transportation. The time has come to organize and demand that the RTA serves the workers that hold up New Orleans.

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Celebrating 300 Years of New Orleans History? Working People Have Nothing to Celebrate!

By Malcolm Suber

The residents of New Orleans are being battered by the omnipresence of New Orleans’ ruling class promoting this city’s tricentennial. For the white supremacist ruling class it has been 300 years of consolidating their rule by every scheme available. They have grown fat, rich and comfortable in their mansion sized homes and glittering office towers. Vacations in the summer. Good education for their kids. Eating at the famous restaurants . Attending a constant round of balls and business luncheons. Clearly the rich white ruling class of New Orleans has much to celebrate.

But what do we working people, especially the Black working class people of New Orleans, have to celebrate? Not much! Although the working class does all the work and are the creators of New Orleans food and culture, the ruling class almost exclusively benefits from the culture we produce. We are assigned to the bottom rungs of society. We struggle to keep a roof over our heads. The city which fleeces us with sales taxes, parking fees and red light cameras provides little for us. Rent and daycare are too high; police terror and incarceration are too frequent We have little time for ourselves or our families.
The ruling class is salivating about the extra tens of thousands of tourists that will come to New Orleans to celebrate the tricentennial. Profits are anticipated to grow by hundreds of millions of dollars. Ask yourself, will New Orleans workers be better off?

The tricentennial celebrations reinforce the complete mastery of the racist white ruling class which has ruled New Orleans since its founding. The ruling class waged war to remove the indigenous peoples from this land and imported kidnapped Africans to come to the colony to do the heavy work of felling the cypress trees and draining the swamps. The plantation owners and the apparatus created to perpetuate the chattel slave system accumulated great wealth from the unpaid labor of the enslaved Africans.

When New Orleans and Louisiana experimented with a multi-racial democracy based on legal equality for the freedmen during Reconstruction, the planter class organized the White League to overthrow the reconstruction government. The terrorist atrocities include the 1866 massacre of hundreds at the Mechanics Institute and the September 1874 coup against the Reconstruction government. This counter revolution ushered in the Jim Crow period and the virtual re-enslavement of Black freedmen and women into the share cropping system.

Black people and their allies struggled to maintain the gains of emancipation but were overwhelmed by the forces of reaction and white supremacy. The US government withdrew federal troops from the south who had been there to guarantee the political rights of the freedmen. The state of Louisiana adopted a white supremacist state constitution and passed all types of laws curtailing the rights of Black people; especially their right to vote.

When the Civil Rights and the freedom struggle of the Black nation reemerged in the 1950s, the white supremacist ruling fomented a mass racist movement to support racial discrimination and segregation. This forced separation was entirely in the interest of the ruling class to keep all workers in the South poorly paid and super exploited.