Educators demand a fair contract and protest Randolph Ward's intimidation tactics

The following was initially posted on another thread...

1. The Oakland teacher's strike can be won. The Oakland Unified School District can be rapidly compelled to settle, and to the overwhelming advantage of striking teachers -- if this strike immediately leads to a city-wide school kids walkout.

2. The word for this should be spread by people who aren't strikers, and aren't employees of the school district.

This will prevent any individual strikers from being singled out and victimized later.

3. An action waged in this manner might result in some working people getting a better deal that we get when we play by the horseshit rules of trade unionism. It may also tend, in a very slight way, to politicize the strike and give it something of a more general character.

4. Now, I don't have any kids, and I don't exactly hang out with the under-18 set. So I have no idea of what the level of class consciousness is among kids these days. An appeal for a mass student walkout should certainly be phrased in terms of class solidarity. Most kids in public school are future or current wage slaves, and besides, in any case it's just the right thing to do.

But the real effective appeal of this might be a more amorphous anti-authoritarian one -- kids hate school; my guess is most do, at least. I did, back when I was a kid, (sometime way, way back, during the Coolidge administration, I believe.)

This also suggest another problem in communicating a message that resonates, which is that a lot of schoolkids may percieve of teachers as coercive authority figures.

So the appeal of this should be couched as a jumbo-sized holiday for school kids.

The resulting city-wide chaos, or, let's say, "adultist" fears of vast numbers of unruly young people flooding into Oakalnd's downtown and fucking up the city's bond rating, and the appeal of Oaktown condo living to yuppie gentrifiers might bring the OUSD back to the bargaining table on bended knee at speeds approaching that of light.

5. Calls for mass picketting as a fundamental element of a winning strategy for striking teachers might come from the right place emotionally -- but that's not going to win this strike, or most other strikes, either.

Only new tactics that jettison virtually the entire framework of the classical, social democratic workers' movement are going to be effective in the short term -- and more importantly in the long term .

The following event is being put on, and will be attended, by mainstream activists and politicos, but it might be useful to see what the climate for solidarity around the impending strike is.

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SATURDAY, JANUARY 28, 2006

9AM - 2PM

FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF OAKLAND, 685 14TH STREET

CHILD CARE, MEALS AND TRANSLATION PROVIDED

TBOS Coalition is made up of grassroots youth
organizing groups, parent organizing groups, and
committed community allies. Some participating groups
include: Californians for Justice, Kids First Oakland,
Parent Leadership Action Network (PLAN), Oakland
Parents Together, Youth Together, Youth in Focus,
Movement Strategy Center If you have any questions or
would like more information, please contact Mamie Chow
at mamie [at] movementstrategy.org or 510/444-0640 ext.
315.