We Love Our Teachers!
” We are living history,” was the sentiment of Greg Phillips, Harrison County Education Association Vice-President at our last union meeting. He’s certainly qualified to male that call, being a history teacher at Robert C. Byrd High School, as well as holding a Masters Degree.
Greg came to our meeting to lay out the facts that have West Virginia Public State Workers up in arms. Lack of meaningful raises, loss of seniority protections, and changes to PEIA that will send health insurance premiums into the stratosphere, and possibly out of reach for many teachers. He lamented the fact that while West Virginia teachers are unionized, many other of our Public Employees aren’t. Without a union in place, all employers are “employees at will”, meaning they can be fired without cause and very little legal protection. Like all union members, it’s up to them to stand and fight for those who don’t dare stand or fight for themselves. They include the State Police, Department of Highways, Corrections Officers, Department of Health and Human Resources, Child Protective Services, as well as many other public employees.
How bad is the teacher situation in our state?
Teacher pay in West Virginia ranks 48th in comparison to other states (inversely, our PART TIME State Legislature’s pay ranks 5th in the nation compared to other states).
There are over 700 open teaching positions in West Virginia Public Schools.
Last year, WVU and Marshall graduated over 1500 teachers, and only about 400 stayed in this state. Others went to neighboring states where they can earn 20K-30K more for doing the same job.
80% of all West Virginians live within 2 hours of a state border (Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania).
The National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers have, for the FIRST TIME, united under one banner in this fight!
One big difference in the job of teaching as compared to other professions, the people who elect to become teachers feel a calling to that work. It’s common to hear such things like that when it comes to the clergy or medical professions, but often overlooked when it comes to teaching. The people who teach don’t do it for the money. Offsetting the mediocre pay was the fact that teachers have enjoyed good health insurance and a collegial working environment.
PEIA introduced something called “Go 365”. It’s a wellness program component added to PEIA, much like our own Health and Wellness program. Unlike our program, which is incentive based, PEIA’s is a penalizing program. What this means is that if you do not participate, you will be penalized with higher health insurance premiums. As an example of how intrusive and unreasonable this is, Go 356 requires teachers to sign up at a gym or fitness center, BUT, it must be an “approved” site. One teacher learned that his closest eligible fitness center was over three hours away!
Teachers are so important to our society. Just last week, three teachers gave their lives in the Florida school shooting protecting students. Other teachers do less heralded, but equally heroic things to protect children. Teachers are another major part of our nation’s social safety net. They do so much more than just teach. They monitor, counsel, and even worry about their students, much like surrogate parents. In some cases, teachers may be one of the few positive examples of adult authority figures in some kids lives. There are personal costs, even after the financial ones teachers encounter when they spend their own money for classroom supplies. There are horror stories that teachers carry with them long after the student moves on, worthy of any battlefield action that causes PTSD in many of our country’s vets. These are offset by other stories of a child who succeeds against all the odds stacked against them to become a very wonderful and special person.
Unions too often are equated with politics. This is especially true for public sector unions when a political majority takes control that has an anti-worker philosophy. In this, it’s public sector unions who are usually the first to sound the alarm when they start seeing union-busting and worker punishing legislation being offered in statehouses all over the country. It’s no wonder that unions find themselves in the crosshairs of those who use their elected positions to benefit themselves and their cronies.
Teachers fall into that unique category of public sector jobs that are being demonized by some lawmakers and their stealth PACS ( along with police, firefighters, postal employees, and many other groups). These folks would have YOU to believe that public schools are an antique anachronism left over by the previous century and teachers are in the business of indoctrinating your kids in all things evil in the world and brainwashing them into accepting that’s the way it should be. They want you to see teachers as an enemy, and the campaign against them has intensified by some claiming teachers don’t care about parents having to make sitting arrangements or children being without school provided meals. What’s NOT being talked about is the work teachers have done, working through churches and other civic organizations, to provide meals and childcare during the walkout.
Of course, parents that are dedicated and engaged in their children’s education know better. To them, teachers are partners and assets in building their kids into well rounded adults. Teachers are also union members, and they would much rather be in the classroom than on the picket line!
There’s a reason why unions are called “locals”. That’s because the membership is made up of your friends, family, and neighbors. It takes a breakdown of community for these folks to quit talking to each other, opening the door for them to fall prey to the decisiveness of special interests propaganda designed to divide us in every possible way.
A good example is what recently happened to Oprah (yes, that Oprah) when her name was half-heartedly floated as a possible 2018 challenger of President Trump. Not very long afterward, you could see memes being floated attacking Oprah Winfrey on every conceivable level. Oprah has never acknowledged, much less announced that she has any interest in being the President of the United States.
Bottom line is that West Virginia’s entire future starts with our being able to attract and keep the best, brightest, and qualified teachers. To do this, teachers need a decent wage, good health insurance, and protections and respect for their seniority earned over years of educating students. The enemies of teachers are pushing for Charter schools, or a voucher program .This is the privatization of education into private, for profit, hands. This turns education into a pay to play scheme designed to funnel tax money out of public schools and directly in the hands of privateers. The winners are the Charter school owners and the rich kids who can afford the tuition. The losers are the teachers, the poor kids, the special needs kids, and disabled kids, whom the charter schools do not have to accept.
This is why we MUST support our teachers in this epic struggle.Even the cold wet weather could dampen the fire of our local teachers. There were horn blasts, shouts of encouragement, and a general outpouring of support as they waved signs and cheered in the rain. The struggle they are in is for the benefit of all West Virginians, and as for those who work against West Virginia’s workers; WE WILL REMEMBER IN NOVEMBER!
Constitution Optional
Some may wonder why 304 would elect to have so many articles about the past on our website. The answer is that most people are ignorant (meaning uninformed, NOT stupid) about our labor history, not having been exposed to it in school or at home. This has left a gap in the public consciencesness of the many complex and unexplained ways social and political attitudes and trends can affect working people in real time.
Regardless of who you voted for, it’s undeniable that the 2016 election will go down as one of the most controversial in American history. So many allegations among so many unpopular candidates left us with an electorate and country with deep philosophical and social differences.
Media bias was one charge leveled by both campaigns against the other periodically throughout the race. The media took a beating, even literally, in trying to cover and convey each candidate’s platform.
Freedom of the Press is one of the most fundamental rights that our founding fathers agreed was important in making us a just and moral society. Over the years, this right has taken everything from potshots to downright sieges in one party or the other attempting to muzzle the opposition.
One successful suppression of opposition happened in Huntington, WV, on May 9th, 1912. A newspaper office was raided by militiamen, on the orders of then West Virginia Governor Henry Hatfield. Under the direction of Major Tom Davis, U.S. Troops laid waist to the printing company’s presses, typesettings, as well as any printed material already produced by the printer.
The staff of the printing company were placed under arrest, then the Sherriff was ordered to turn his prisoners over to the military, who were then hauled to jail in Charleston. They were held without due process of law, and never charged.
The miltary then proceeded to Editor-in- Chief Wyatt Henry Thompson’s private residence and, over the objections of the his wife and even the Sheriff, proceeded to ramsack the home and remove many private letters and correspondence without any type of search warrants or writs.
You would think something like this would be unthinkable in a Democratic society based on law and justice.
The business the printing company was engaged in was printing a pro-labor, pro-union newspaper, and also serving the printing needs of the local unions that were trying to organize in the area.
The bottom line is; while many politicians try to incite fear and ignite rage in the voting public, the only times that the rights of Americans have been directly attacked has been during times of labor and racial strife. This is why we, as union members, must realize that LABOR RIGHTS ARE CIVIL RIGHTS.
Rifles are still occasionally found buried in the soil of southern West Virginia, left by the miners who dared to march against the corrupt Sheriff of Logan County, Don Chafin, during the Battle of Blair Mountain. They left their rifles buried in the forest because they knew that the militia, who were called out by the governor, but, like the good Sheriff, were working with the forces of the coal operators and would immediately confiscate the weapons as soon as they walked off the mountain (so much for the 2nd Amendment).
Truth is, our country’s sacred and much heralded Constitution was as much help to workers of the early 20th century, as a suitcase would be to a gorilla. Illegal arrests, kangaroo military courts, and even murder of men, women, and children were the norm for coal field families of West Virginia. Ruthless coal operators evicted families with small children out of their barely habitable homes and into the wilderness to die of starvation, disease, and exposure in tents pitched at the back of the hollows.
As if life hadn’t been hard enough, the coal barons did everything they could to make it even harder on the workers who dared to try and improve the miserable state of a hopeless way of life that seemed to consume the health and lives of all who toiled deep in the mines.
Evidence that survived that period is on display for all to see at the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, appropriately located in Matewan, WV. On display are the simple items used by mining families in the early 1900’s, like razors, and examples of the tents that many were forced to live in, plus a collection of coal company scrip (only redeemable at the company store), as well as many of the firearms from the period of the Mine Wars. Springfield rifles, chambered in either 30-40 Krag or 30-06 Springfield, as well as .45 caliber “Tommy” guns made famous by gangsters, and early Winchester lever action rifles that the coal companies bought in bulk to support the armies they created to oppress the miners. You can read the actual newspapers that celebrated the “Miners Hero”, Sid Hatfield. It was “Smiling Sid” who faced down the hated Baldwin-Felts agents in what would come to be known as the Matewan Massacre, only to be ultimately gunned down on the steps of the McDowell County Courthouse in Welch a year later by Baldwin-Felts agents (none of whom were ever arrested or charged).
If you are lucky enough to be in a union, the you owe it to yourself and your family to BE ACTIVE, and act in SOLIDARITY with your union Brothers and Sisters. When you hear a union officer saying that people fought and died for YOUR right to collectively bargain, they aren’t kidding.
Don’t believe all the bad press that claim unions to be outdated and dying.
Remember who owns the press.
Keep the faith in your union and each other. Don’t let the “charm campaign” of company owned stooges, or divide and conquer tactics employed by rich business moguls trying to pump up huge and unearned executive compensation or prop up sagging stock prices by cheating workers dissuade you in standing with those who toil daily right beside you.
As always, don’t just take OUR word for it, click on the links highlighted above to read for yourself
Lessons For Effective Management, Issue #1
Issue #1- Love Your Hell Raisers
There are a lot of books, articles, even whole magazines that are devoted to teaching managers how to be effective leaders so they can maximize their human performance for greater efficiency and profit. You have heard many of them mentioned on this site. Books by multi-millionaire CEOs that light the way for other CEOs, like “Jack Welch and the GE Way“, or Al Dunlap’s “Mean Business.” These books are so powerful that they spawned books about them and the authors, like “Chainsaw: The Notorious Career of Al Dunlap in the Era of Profit-at-Any-Price,” and, “The Billionaire Shell Game”.
Before the era of “GREED” and the philosophy of “ME”, management training focused on building relationships between management and employees through the values important to most of us, like decency, respect, forgiveness, and the lessons we learned about The Golden Rule; ““So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets” (Holy Bible, Mathew 7:12).
These principles were ingrained into us as Americans, and business and industry adopted them from lessons learned over decades of violent labor uprisings, work stoppages, and bloody strikes. Through concessions won through unionization, the American workplace evolved into an extension that reflected our society. The ideals of fairness, justice, and equality found their way to the shop floors and became the expected standard rather than the exception.
So what happened?
What happened was that working people mistakenly thought the war was over. We thought, wrongly, we had earned the right to simply go to work, do our job, collect our pay, and go home in peace. Meanwhile, the corporate masters were plotting, and then – BOOM– they launched their attack!
They didn’t aim their guns at the workers, who had been lulled to sleep by decades of labor bliss. So soundly we slept that we quit paying attention to politics and business trends. We didn’t go to our union meetings, and pretty soon our elected political representatives, as well as union officers, started looking out more for themselves and not us.
Still, we slept.
Then, a little at a time and after the corporatists put their political lapdogs to work to change the laws to justify it, wages and benefits started falling. Two-Tier contracts and concessions became the new norm. For those unions that were left, promises were made that these were temporary emergency measures to help workers keep their jobs and be competitive. Companies claimed that much of the cuts would not be necessary if they didn’t have to comply with the restrictive and outdated notions of collective bargaining agreements, so union membership fell more.
We were assured that our industrial base didn’t matter because we would all have high paying jobs in technology. Then the tech jobs followed our manufacturing out of our country and to those countries who have enslaved citizens who work for less than sustanance wages and live in abject poverty at the hands of their oppressive leaders.
Now, here we are.
Companies have been bought out or merged and then gutted for their usable parts and for mega-profit, irregardless of communities, workers, and jobs. CEOs are raking in huge sums of money, even when they bankrupt the business they run, as wages for those who do the actual work are in incremental retreat.
While we were told to worry about flag burners, abortionists, gays, and our guns; prevailing wage was killed, and “Right To Work” became the law of the land before we could even blink.
We are told to blame the welfare fraudsters, and that we should drug test the malingerers. In the meantime, the ones who unleashed the jackals of deregulation, greed, and reckless capitalism upon all of us are sitting in far away locales, via their private jets, where their money lays untaxed and hidden while laughing among themselves that we are so easily duped.
There are a few of us who woke up out of our coma early, looked around, and then sounded the alarm. We were labled “radicals,” “troublemakers’, and “hell-raisers.”
We prefer being called, “UNION THUGS”.
It used to be that innovativeness was an asset, creativity a positive, and self assuredness a virtue; now they are viewed as threats. When standing up was once admired, now it is feared. Those who dare, are labeled, targeted, and made examples of as a warning to others.
A lesson business needs to learn over is that they have a duty to treat their workers with dignity and respect. They can preach about it, codify it in long winded wordy corporate policies and guidelines written in eloquent legal-eze, and stop the war on wages, benefits, and working conditions.
To do this, they are going to have to do something that seems unthinkable to business leaders, and that is to embrace their hell-raisers, These folks are their conscience and they are passionate and fully invested in their jobs.
It’s the trouble makers, the radicals, and the hell-raisers that have moved this country forward for well over 200 years. They forced change when faced with injustice, they innovated when facing life’s challenges, and they found a better way to do things that were more productive, safer, and easier.
Together, working people created everything that America stands for and makes our country the beacon of hope it is seen as in the world. Without the radicals, we cease to be America. It’s a part of our identity, our culture, and our heritage.