Chicago, IL – On Monday night, Oct. 10, just before the midnight deadline, the bargaining committee of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) tentatively accepted a new contract offer from management.

What the teachers beat back

First, the attempt by the city to make them pay 7% more into their pension each year. New hires will have to pay an additional percentage, but then will receive additional raises equal to that loss, so they lose nothing. This is important, because the creation of a lower, second tier of wages or benefits for new employees is one of the ways that bosses have divided union workers against each other.

Second, they hung onto steps and lanes, raises that come with anniversaries of hiring dates, and with advances in education level by teachers.

What was won

Overall raises were modest: 2% and 2.5% in the last two years of a four-year agreement.

Some things were won for students. As Sarah Chambers, the youngest member of the 40-member bargaining committee said the morning after the settlement, “The biggest wins for our students are that counselors will be able to counsel instead of doing case manager duties, and there will be teacher assistants added to kindergarten to second grade classes with over 32 students.”

In a move that surprised veterans of the union movement, the Mayor Rahm Emanuel conceded to turn over to the schools’ $87 million of the $175 million surplus in the Tax Increment Financing (TIF) funds. The rest of the $175 million will also go to the city’s general fund for the first time ever, helping to pay for many services for working people.

TIFs are schemes where Emanuel has control of real estate taxes in areas featuring politically connected developers. These tax dollars are kept from funding schools and other needs, and instead fund playgrounds for the wealthy. Teachers even held a one day strike on April 1 with the main demand to get Emanuel to spend this money on the needs of the people. Getting Emanuel up off of the TIF funds is a major victory for the CTU.

Recognizing that these are big wins, Chambers warned that the teachers and their communities have a struggle in front of them. “We are going to have a bumpy ride under the austerity conditions of the next three years. More crisis is coming. Get ready to fight like hell, you all.”

All of these elements of the contract were won since the city brought an offer to the union in January. The union’s House of Delegates – 800 elected teachers and professionals in the schools – rejected that offer overwhelmingly. The gains were made because of a credible strike threat and the willingness of the rank and file members to fight.

#ChicagoIL #ChicagoTeachersUnion #DefendEducation #TeachersUnions #CTU

The union organized the actions to show support for their negotiating committee which is in contract negotiations with the school district. The negotiations have dragged on for months and are in mediation. The union expressed the urgency of taking action in a message on their Facebook page, saying, “Top down decision making in our schools has created inequitable, understaffed learning environments where suspensions are on the rise and gaps are widening. Our students can't wait any longer for site driven solutions that empower families and teachers. They can't wait for fully staffed schools and guaranteed access to high quality pre-K. Our students cannot wait any longer for access to arts and physical education.”

#StPaulMN #DefendEducation #TeachersUnions

Jacksonville, FL – With more than 50 activists and community members present, the Duval County School Board voted unanimously, Dec. 16, to change the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest High School. The historic vote by the school board comes at the end of a six-month campaign by the Jacksonville Progressive Coalition (JPC) and other forces to drop the local high school's racist namesake.

“We have to change the name of this school because this city can no longer honor a slave trader, war criminal and grand wizard of the KKK,” said Richard Blake, a Teamster and member of the JPC who spoke at the school board meeting before the vote. “The heritage of Nathan B. Forrest is not our heritage – it is that of the oppressor.”

Superintendent Nikolai Vitti began the school board meeting by sharing the board's findings in polling the community about the name change. A poll conducted last week by the school board at Forrest High School found that about 64% of the student body favored changing the name. He then made a recommendation to the board to change the school's name, which was approved by every board member.

Paula D. Wright, one of the school board members who spoke out in support of the name change, said, “We talk about what's in a name. A name does matter because it can service the foundation of how we think of ourselves and how we move beyond the particular place we're in at the time.” She shared with the board and the audience her own story of attending school and receiving second-class treatment as an African American student. “This moves our entire city towards equality and justice.”

The campaign to rename Forrest High School drew hundreds of community activists together, who attended forums, gathered petitions and protested the school's racist name. More than 160,000 people signed an online petition at change.org started by Jacksonville community activist Omotayo Richmond. The JPC spent months gathering more than 2000 hand-written community surveys, which overwhelmingly showed support for changing the name. Supporters of the name change also brought their energy and arguments to several town hall forums called by the school board, which pressured the board into changing the name.

Forrest High School, named after the infamously racist slave trader and Confederate general Nathan B. Forrest, received its name in 1959. The United Daughters of the Confederacy chose the name as a stunt to protest the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which desegregated all-white schools throughout the country. To advance their racist agenda, they ignored the students' vote to keep the school named Valhalla High School.

The name Nathan Bedford Forrest is a blunt reminder of racist hatred, violence and terror. Forrest was a brutal slave trader, ordered the infamous Fort Pillow Massacre, and led the KKK. At Fort Pillow, Forrest’s troops executed hundreds of captured and surrendering Union soldiers, most of whom were African American, which Forrest bragged about in his military dispatches. The Daughters of the Confederacy chose the name to intimidate courageous African American civil rights activists, many of them teenagers, struggling for freedom.

“Tonight was a historic blow to the racism of the Deep South,” said Fernando Figueroa, an activist with the JPC. “The neo-confederates who spoke in favor of Forrest saw the writing on the wall. We're building the freedom struggle in Jacksonville star by star.”

When Forrest High School opened in 1959, it was an all-white, segregated school. Today, 54% of the school's approximately 1800 students are African-American.

Jason Fischer, another school board member, concluded his remarks in support of the name change, saying, “We need to make today about honoring the future, which is our children.”

#JacksonvilleFL #AntiRacism #KuKluxKlan #DefendEducation #NathanBedfordForrest #NathanBedfordForrestHigh #segregation #JacksonvilleProgressiveCoalition

Minneapolis, MN – On March 12, the University of Minnesota presented the report it commissioned on its management structure to the Senate Higher Education Committee.

Cherrene Horazuk, President of AFSCME 3800 and a clerical worker in the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, said of the report, “This confirms what we have been saying for years. The university has a problem with top-heavy management. We see again and again that front line staff who serve students and the community get laid off while upper management positions not only are protected, but are increased along with their salaries.”

The report uses two models for analyzing four departments handpicked by university administration. The benchmarking used by one of the models (Bain and Company) states that there should be six to seven direct reports per supervisor for expertise-based functions and eleven to thirteen direct reports for task-based functions. The U of M falls grossly below this standard, with the average manager in three of these departments (Procurement, Finance, Human Resources) supervising five people or fewer. The other model (Sibson) paints a more favorable picture but still finds 29 people in these four departments who supervise only one person. Neither model takes into account staffing changes that have occurred over time, and thus miss the greater question of how the U of M got so top-heavy.

Melanie Steinman, Chief Steward of AFSCME Local 3800 and a clerical worker in American Studies said, “AFSCME has conducted our own analysis of staffing changes from 2008 to 2012, based on numbers provided to us from the university’s Office of Institutional Reporting. Since 2008, civil service positions have been reduced by 7.5% (approximately 750 positions). Of those, AFSCME-represented clerical positions have been reduced by nearly 10% – a loss of 150 jobs. At the same time, upper management (academic administrative staff) increased by 3.8%, or 85 positions.”

Steinman continued, “Most of the AFSCME job losses came in the form of layoffs – real people losing their jobs at the height of the worst economic crisis in nearly a century while the university’s 1% grew and prospered. In the past ten years, hundreds of senior management positions have been added, while tuition has doubled – making a quality education unattainable for the children of many working class Minnesotans.”

She added, “AFSCME at the university is glad to see the governor’s proposal for an increase in funding to the University of Minnesota and MNSCU and for scholarship funds. We also welcome the call for a more accountable university.”

Horazuk stated, “We are glad to hear President Kaler express a commitment to make real changes in the staffing layers and spans at the university. It’s unfortunate that it took front-page headlines in national news outlets for this to come about. Without a serious re-commitment to the University of Minnesota’s original mission to provide accessible and affordable education, as well as a commitment to provide decent, livable wage jobs for all workers, the future for students, workers and all Minnesotans is at risk.”

Horazuk added, “We also question the allocation of nearly half a million dollars to develop a plan for reducing administrative costs when the solution to the U’s administrative bloat is quite simple: chop from the top.”

#MinneapolisMN #UniversityOfMinnesota #AFSCME3800 #DefendEducation #teachersUnions

For many years young people have been told that they should go to college to improve their opportunities in life. And it is true that adults who are college graduates do have higher incomes and lower unemployment rates on average than those who did not get a college degree.

But today’s college students are facing a triple whammy of soaring college costs, cutbacks in public schools that make it more difficult to attend and graduate from college and bleak job prospects once they graduate. After accounting for financial aid, as well as government aid in the form of tax credits, the cost of college tuition has risen 87% faster than the overall rate of inflation over the last ten years. This has led to a huge rise in student loan debt, which now totals about $1 trillion and is more than credit card balances, auto loans or any other consumer debt.

Cutbacks in public colleges and universities are forcing students to take longer (and spend more) to complete their degrees, or turn to even more expensive private schools that at least offer a shorter path to graduation. At Sonoma State University (one of the California State University campuses north of the San Jose-San Francisco Bay area), students this spring were allowed to sign for only nine units in the first round of registration, and then there was a second round where few classes were available for the rest of the units. At that rate it would take a student almost seven years to graduate.

Both these trends of higher fees and class cuts can be seen at the College of San Mateo, a community college about half way between San José and San Francisco. Enrollment at CSM fell 10% over the last year as fees went up 40%, a new, stricter payment policy was implemented and class sections cut. The administration there is planning another 5% cut in class sections, and fees are going up another 30% for this coming fall semester. And to add insult to injury, administrators at CSM and the other campuses in its district are phasing in a 20% raise for themselves, even as they say there is no money for more classes.

Last, but not least, there is a just plain terrible job market for new graduates. Of the nearly 3 million young people with college degrees, about a quarter, or 750,000, had no jobs at all. Another 750,000 were underemployed, or working in occupations that didn’t need a college degree, such as food service workers, receptionists, and retail clerks. A sign of these hard times is that a recent poll of college seniors showed that 85% planned to move back home after graduation. On college campuses across the country, students, with support of progressive faculty and staff and their unions, have been fighting both campus administrators as well as state politicians to limit tuition increases and stop the cutbacks in higher education. But college students and college graduates will need to struggle with the capitalists and their economy to provide more jobs that use their skills.

One reason for the bleak job market is the financial crisis and deep recession brought about by Wall Street’s financing a boom and bust in housing. Studies show that almost all the job losses were in middle-income, semi-skilled jobs that could provide entry-level work for college grads. But the elimination of middle-income jobs did not just start during the last economic downturn.

There is a long term tendency, first described by Karl Marx 150 years ago, for capitalism to deskill jobs with the use of new technology. The government’s Department of Labor estimates that only 10% (3 of 30) of the fastest growing occupations in 2020 will require a college degree, while the other 90% will not.

While right-wing Republicans and those enthralled by or on the payroll of Wall Street call big corporations and the rich “job-creators.” In fact, large U.S. corporations have cut millions of jobs in the United States through the use of technology and off-shoring jobs to other countries. Big business (and capitalism) itself is not about job creation, it is about profit maximization, which often mean cutting jobs and making the remaining workers work even harder. Look at the reaction of Wall Street when a big company announces another round of lay-offs – the company’s stock price goes up, showing that wealthy investors think that the business will be more profitable.

As we build a fightback against tuition increases and even more cuts to education, we also need to demand that the government start a jobs program that puts the millions of unemployed back to work and offers unemployed and underemployed college grads a chance to use their education. Those who see the need for radical change should study the political economy of Marx and other socialists to better understand our capitalist system and the need for a socialist economy that is based on people’s needs, not profit.

#SanJoséCA #BudgetCuts #Capitalism #TuitionHike #DefendEducation #MasaoSuzuki #Marxism

Thousands of students, faculty, and campus workers on over 40 different campuses took action today, Oct. 7, to fight back against the cuts to education. Across the country, people are saying ‘no!’ to the cuts to education, to furloughs and layoffs, to tuition and fee hikes, to cuts to programs and services, and to privatization schemes. The protests are part of a unified day of action in defense of public education.

Since the economic crisis began in 2007, funding for schools in many states has been drastically cut. Last year, massive protests erupted in California when the UC system tried to implement draconian cuts. Since then, a nation-wide movement to stop the attacks on education has emerged, encompassing schools from California to Alabama to New York. Over twenty chapters of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) participated in the Oct. 7 national day of action, some showing films, while others held protests on campus.

At the University of Illinois – Chicago (UIC), over a hundred people, including members of SDS, graduate students in the Graduate Employees Organization (GEO), faculty, and campus workers in SEIU Local 73, rallied on the quad to send their message to the university.

“The U of I system president Mike Hogan got a 37% pay increase this year, while incoming freshman were slammed with tuition hikes and workers in SEIU 73 are fighting for a fair contract and job security,” said Kait McIntyre of the UIC chapter of SDS. “We are demanding that Hogan rescind his pay raise. We are saying 'chop from the top' – that is, the bloated costs of the university bureaucracy and top administrators should be cut, not our diversity centers, our jobs, our transportation services.”

At the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, where the protest for education rights on March 4th ended in police violence and the arrest of 16 students, over 250 rallied to make their demands clear to the incoming Chancellor – as a result of the education rights campaign, the former Chancellor resigned this fall. As protestors marched down the street past an elementary school, children on the playground ran to the fence and gave high-fives to the graduate and undergraduate students, faculty, and workers who were marching for education rights.

“We were victorious in getting the charges against the 'Milwaukee 16' dropped, and forcing Chancellor Santiago to resign,” said Jacob Flom of Milwaukee SDS. “But we won’t stop there. We want the incoming chancellor to know that we won’t stand for having the budget balanced on the backs of students, faculty, and campus workers.”

At the University of California – Los Angela (UCLA), where last March a coalition of students, faculty, and workers occupied the administration building in response to sharp cuts, SDS along with unions and the UC Fights Back Coalition brought together over 100 people to speak-out against the budget cuts and privatization proposals, and solidarity with campus workers. They also put out hundreds of helium balloons in lecture halls and cafeterias across campus letting people know about the attack on public education. Protestors then marched into the administration building, through the chancellor's office and other buildings on campus, chanting and giving speeches about how the cuts were affecting UCLA, and about the important victories won through struggle at the school in the past.

At UC-Berkeley a protest with over 1000 people turned into a sit-in at the library with over 600 students participating. Signs saying “DREAM Act Now! Build the Movement to fight the New Jim Crow!” and “Public Education for All!” were held as students shouted “Whose University? Our University!” Students are protesting against the continued privatization of education as well as the recent announcement that 200 more staff positions are going to be cut, as well as a freeze in faculty hiring, and a rise in out-of-state student enrollment.

At the University of Minnesota, a rally organized by the Chop from the Top Coalition brought out two hundred people to demand no tuition and fee hikes, no layoffs to instructional and support staff, and shared power in governance.

A march from the State Capitol building in Raleigh, NC was organized by Raleigh FIST and SDS, as well as DREAM Team NC. Over 100 people came to the rally and marched downtown. Demands included stopping the cuts to education, no to tuition hikes, for Congress to pass the DREAM Act, and money for jobs and education – not war and occupation.

At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, over 100 protestors “graded” the university administration on their quality of defending public education, then marched to drop off the grades, entering the administration building chanting “They say furlough, we say hell no!” and “who’s university? Our university!”

Other SDS chapters in Syracuse, Rochester, Waukesha, Chapel-Hill, Tuscaloosa, and at the University of Oklahoma, James Madison University, Wilbur Wright City College, and Clarkstown South High School, along with many others, participated in the national day of action.

For SDS, Oct. 7 was also a day to speak out against the recent FBI raids and subpoenas of antiwar and solidarity activists in the U.S., including members of SDS.

“Protesting the U.S. government is not a crime” Justin Wooten of Gainesville SDS. “Whether we are speaking out against U.S. occupation or fighting back against attacks to education, the FBI has no right to spy and infiltrate our movements, to raid the homes of activists and their families, to threaten them with jail time if they don’t cooperate with the unfair grand jury. SDS won’t let the raids intimidate us or scare us into silence. We will continue to fight against U.S. wars and occupation, and to fight for education rights.”

At many rallies across the country, students noted that Oct. 7 is the 9th anniversary of U.S. government’s invasion of Afghanistan. That trillions are being spent on the wars and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, while funding for public education gets slashed, is not lost on students. At the University of North Carolina – Asheville (UNCA), over 50 students demonstrated on the quad and marched through the student union, demanding “education, not occupation.”

“From who and what the U.S. government funds, it's clear what their priorities are,” said Sarah Buchner of UNCA SDS. “They bailout Wall Street and big bankers, give billions every week to fight wars and maintain occupations overseas, but won’t adequately fund education. Accessible, affordable, quality education is a right. And we’re not going to stop fighting for that right.”

#UnitedStates #EducationRights #StudentsForADemocraticSocietySDS #DefendEducation