School workers’ strikes appear to be the new canary in the mine of society, measuring levels of exploitation, oppression, and freedom. Teachers in Detroit joined teachers in Oaxaca, Mexico, and Palestine, in job actions in 2006. In Palestine and Oaxaca, the strikes quickly spun well beyond mere battles about wages, hours and working conditions, and became social uprisings, demonstrating the thesis that educators are centrally positioned in many societies to initiate, if not complete, fights for equality and democracy. In addition, the strikes clearly show how the imperial, perpetual-war, policies of the U.S. reverberate within, and without, the U.S.

On September 13, Detroit teachers voted by a slim majority to halt a 16 day illegal strike and return to work, voting on a Tentative Agreement (TA) later. The strike in Detroit represented a collision of complex social forces, and their representatives. Each had to fight because each was cornered. The local ruling classes, sometimes divided against each other, but united against the working classes, are irrevocably tied to U.S. battles for empire through the auto-industry’s almost desperate search for cheaper labor, markets, financial control, social domination, and raw materials, and through the war industry’s ties to what was once known as, “Detroit, the Arsenal of Democracy.” The lessons from this true class struggle are key to understanding the central role of school in a society which has nothing to offer youth but temporary jobs and endless war.

Background

In 1999, white politicians in Lansing abolished the elected Detroit Public School (DPS) Board, replaced it with an appointed board. The Takeover Board failed in every promise they made. Test scores plummeted. The number of failing schools doubled. Safety in school remained an issue for kids and school workers as well. The Takeover Board looted the bond money that was earmarked for school construction, rewarding allies with contracts that were frequently paid, but never even started. DPS student population rose to 91% African-American.

Students continued to pour out of DPS, at a rate of about 11,000 a year. By 2004, the system claimed less than 125,000 students, about its largest size, down from 180,000 in 2000. Books, supplies, heat, windows, libraries, running water, toilet paper, things taken for granted in most schools, often did not appear in Detroit, unless school workers supplied them. The Takeover Board, which had an estimated budget surplus of nearly $169 million in 2001, left behind a deficit of about $31 million in 2005.

By 2006, the DPS had replaced the failed Takeover Board with an elected board of people. DPS closed 30 schools in the last five years and plans to kill off at least 100 more. In 2002, nearly 20,000 Detroit kids attended charters, often run by for-profit companies, with each child representing a $7,000 loss to DPS.

Detroit teachers have made concessions after concessions, not only to save jobs, but on the promise that their sacrifices would save the school system, help kids. Between 2003 and now, Detroit teachers gave up $63 million in concessions and “loaned” the district a week’s pay.

On Strike! Shut it Down!

On Sunday, August 27, 2006, members of Detroit Federation of Teachers (DFT), the union representing Detroit teachers and other school workers, voted to shut down the schools. DPS management demanded $90 million in concessions, about $10,000 per school worker. DPS threatened to lay off 2,000 employees if the demands were not met.

It was easy to see the strike coming, even in the Spring. DFT leadership, led by president Janna Garrison, could have done many things to prepare for it. The DFT could have:

• Prepared for Freedom Schooling for kids, demonstrating why things are as they are within an economic system that requires inequality, exploitation, racism, nationalism and irrationalism and helping many parents who need a place to take their children when they go to work.

• Demanded, in real terms, Books! Supplies! True Caps for Lower Class Size!
• Demanded academic freedom and the right to teach each child well, not teach to a test, and the freedom to opt out of the racist testing which programs Detroit kids to lose.
• Supported a just tax system, tax the rich, the corporate, the sports spectacles, the casinos, and remove the unjust taxes from poor and working people,
• No wage or benefit cuts, but increases to make up for past losses, and against projected inflation.
• Planned to unleash the creativity of 9,000 school workers, urging them to design their own banners, create their own songs, hold coffee klatches in neighborhoods, do plays and guerrilla theater for kids, make the picket lines a joyful celebration of rebels.
• Repeatedly demonstrated the direct connections between capitalism, imperialism, war, curricula regimentation, high-stakes tests, racism, and the destruction of civil life in the city.

But the daily processes of school life are rarely bargained in teacher contracts. This means that a culture of disrespect and contempt for educators, parents, and kids can run free in DPS, and the union contractually prohibits itself from action. One common cause of any strike, human dignity, is off the bargaining table before bargaining begins.

So, for the first week of the strike, DFT members picketed empty buildings, rather than walking door to door in communities with, say, flyers they themselves prepared and with a plan for freedom schools, for day care for people with special needs. There was, really, little for the rank and file to do, as leaders prefer it. Only about 500 of the DFT members turned out for the Labor Day celebration. A mass city-wide demonstration to specifically support the strike could have been called, but the DFT didn’t call it.

On the first day of school that was scheduled for kids to attend, William Coleman III opened the schools to test the strength of the educators. As it turned out, only about 40,000 kids showed up; one small child wandered off, unsupervised, from school, to be found by a picket captain, blocks away. The schools were closed for the duration of the strike.

On September 2, the DFT announced that, on their request, three Detroit preachers had been invited to the negotiation sessions and the talks moved from the usual site, the Michigan Employment Relations Commission offices, to the Fellowship Chapel of one of the ministers who is also president of the Detroit NAACP and a man who spoke out openly against the strike before it began. He’s also a consultant with Holt-Rinehart Winston, the textbook company which is deeply invested in high-stakes testing.

On September 10, elected County Judge Susan Borman issued a back to work order that was read to the members in a meeting of about 3,000. As the order was read, members chanted, “No Contract! No Work!”

DFT President Garrison read the court order and closed the meeting. The potential of a mass meeting of 3,000 educators engaged in one of the sharpest classroom battles of a decade was lost.

On September 12, after negotiators on both sides agreed to halt bargaining, and an assigned mediator consented, Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick directed all sides to his office, where he demanded a settlement. The preachers intervened as well, indicating they would turn the community on the strikers.

Garrison and the DFT negotiators caved in completely, but reported to the membership that they had gained a “non-wage concessionary” tentative agreement.

On September 13, DFT members met to vote on whether to return to work, not on the tentative agreement. DFT leadership had shifted the voting procedure on the tentative agreement into mail ballots, which are more easily controlled and manipulated.

The Sellout

DFT bureaucrats, after a 16 day strike in which heroic educators defied state laws, countered an incessant drumbeat of bad press attacking them for being responsible for the destruction of schooling, organized their own pickets, and began to set up their own lines of communications, agreed to a package with, on their statements, is about $68 million in concessions. But DFT lied about even that, calling it a “non-wage concessions package.”

At this time, what we know of the contents of the contract are:

• DFT bargained away a 10% co-pay for health benefits for all educators, probably a loss of $50 per pay.

• DFT bargained a wage freeze for year one, a 1% increase for year two, and a 2.5% increase for year three. DFT has repeatedly torn up wage increase promises mid-contract, and just returned the money to DPS as yet another concession. Even so, if inflation remains unchanged, during the three years of the contract, educators will lose at least 10% of their earning power.
• One prep period was taken from every elementary teacher, the vast majority of the educators, meaning the work day is extended, with no pay. That is a wage cut. The teachers lose pay for three days of the strike, plus lose pay for Labor Day. That is a wage cut.
• DFT guarantees support for a potential state tax increase, again alienating educators from the citizenry. That weakens the union.
• DFT claimed they “won a promise” from DPS that the district would assume liability for its employees who were not engaged in unlawful or unprofessional conduct. DFT did not note that this is simply the law, nor did they advise members that a DPS refusal to accept liability cannot be addressed through the grievance procedure, but is a decision of DPS alone. This clause is a shabby trick.
• DFT agreed five days of all teacher sick leave would be frozen, not paid out. This is a wage cut. It’s a no interest loan.
• DFT agreed to make it much easier for DPS to use substitute teachers at low pay, and to keep substitutes from becoming tenured teachers, just as DFT had agreed, earlier, to let DPS “reconstitute schools.” This means that DPS can lay off all the teachers in an entire school with, for example, low test scores, and those teachers have no guarantee of another job. As DPS relies heavily on subs, because of deplorable working conditions, this is a significant setback. This will become a wage cut.

Detroit teachers voted by a slim majority to halt their 16 day illegal strike and return to work; they later voted 5,401 to 1,714, by mail ballot, to approve the contract.

The agreement contains nothing about books, supplies, lower class size, academic freedom, or the controversial high-stakes tests. It does nothing about the culture of contempt and disrespect that makes daily life on the job so difficult, and causes students to leave.

Both sides, the DFT and the board, claim a strike could destroy what remains of the once-model Detroit Public Schools, destroyed by, above all, the connection of racism, opportunism, and profits. A fine case could be made that the Detroit Public Schools are already in ruins, and all that is left is to bury them. DPS itself projects another 40% loss of students.

An equally good case can be made that Detroit is now completely ghettoized, that those who remain in the city are fully trapped, and that the extermination of education in the city is only indicative of a society which has nothing to offer black youth but prison or the military, fighting and dying for oil profits. Most Detroit schools can be easily described as either pre-prison, or pre-military, though some elite few (Renaissance High, Cass Tech, etc) still get the basic supplies necessary to conduct, say, pre-teacher training.

Where is hope in all this? Hope is created in the persistent and resistance that the vast majority of the people in the world must engage if they are to survive. Hope is also, however, located in wise leadership, something that Detroit school workers must create.

For the long haul, justice demands organization in new ways, organization that draws people together in a struggle that recognizes the international war of the rich on the poor. Hints of that kind of organizing exist, in Substance, in the Rouge Forum, for example, which brings together people of all ages and races in an educational project that unites people with knowledge and nature. GI resistance is escalating. The immigrant rights movement demonstrated on May Day that a massive general strike is indeed possible. The two million poor people in U.S. prisons are beginning to recognize that it is not so much race, but class, which both divides and unites people, and multi-racial unity is growing in jails. In many cities, workers councils which involve people with two toes inside their unions, and eight toes out, are taking form. Activist youth communes sprout up all over the U.S., and there is a large one in Detroit that played no role in the strike.

The school workers of Detroit might play an exemplary role as well, or, if in retreat, learn from the past, persevere as we all must, and fight again.

The rebellious law-breaking teachers of the Detroit Public Schools strike of 2006 went back to work, conducting the scripted pedagogical programs the No Child Left Behind Act demands, to drill children to pass a test the U.S. has designed for them to fail.

The question of what people need to know, and how they need to come to know it, in order to understand and act in a world already united through systems of production, communication, and transportation, yet in a world that may be described as a war of all on all, is a pedagogical problem. The answer may spin out from the thought and action of educators.

At issue is: Where will the next fight be and what will the next rebels know?

This article was originally published online at Counterpunch. It was written between before the final strike mail-in vote. CM has edited it for reasons of space. Read the orginal article here.

Dr. Rich Gibson lived in Detroit most of his adult life; most of that at Seven Mile and the Lodge. He taught at Wayne State University until 2000, when he moved to San Diego State as an Associate Professor. He is a co-founder of the Rouge Forum. He can be reached at: rgibson (at) pipeline (dot) com.