LOS ANGELES—Base building and long-term struggle have laid the groundwork for big things to come at one high school in California. From the first day I started teaching at the school, I have put my politics in the forefront and built relationships with teachers and students that are centered on openly discussing the world situation.
During lunch, teachers chat about everything from conditions for students at the school to imperialism all over the globe. Teachers and students have waged struggles against scanning and large class sizes, as well as attended large rallies around issues of immigration, police murder, and women’s rights. There is an understanding amongst both teachers and students that we must be active in the world around us in order to change it.
The administration at this school does not understand this foundation that has been laid. So when they tried to start off our school year explaining how teachers would be docked an hour’s pay for being even a minute late to work and that we would be docked pay if we left campus at any time throughout the day, even during our lunch, they assumed we would just roll over and say ok.
At the initial meeting where this attack was laid out, one teacher spoke passionately about how she worked at a school before where this policy was enforced and how it impacted both staff and students. That was enough to get the ball rolling. Staff held planning meetings to discuss how to fight back against this attack.
Part of the plan involved contacting the union for support. We found out quickly that the union president had already given the administration the thumbs up on the plan without even discussing it with our staff. In the course of just one week of work, our staff has now learned the important lesson of the role played by union misleaders.
Even though the top leadership of the union sold us out, our union reps demanded a meeting with the administration to discuss this attack. The administration framed this to the staff as a collaborative meeting and had the goal of getting the staff to set the terms of the attack in order to fool us into more willingly accepting it. We met beforehand as a staff and decided that we would make no concessions to the administration, that we would demand these policies not be enforced and we would be involved in setting the parameters for how they can abuse us.
The meeting went as you would expect. The administration occupied 15 minutes of a 45 minute “collaborative meeting” to talk about how hurt they are that the staff is making such a big deal out of this and destroying our “family” environment at the school. Two of the three administrators even cried.
Their tears did not fool us or deter us. As I said, the groundwork for bold fight back had already been laid. The staff stood united and strong. We said NO! The final outcome of this has yet to be seen, but at this point it appears that we have won the battle.
In the future, we will need to do a better job of connecting attacks like these to students and their families. We know that any attack on the working conditions of teachers is really an attack on the learning conditions of students. This has to be made clearer to the whole staff though so that our organizing strategy embodies that understanding. Overall though, a little fight back has gone a long way in bringing us closer together as a staff and shifting everyone slightly to the left. I look forward to a long history of fight back and struggle with everyone!