ERIC BLANC: In West Virginia, like in most of the United States, public education, teachers and their unions have been under attack for years, decades. So, you can look at this as the straw that broke the camel’s back. The attacks aren’t new.
What happened really this time was that the proposed changes, the proposed cuts to the health insurance plan, really the proposed mechanisms through which the health insurance in particular would affect teachers – mainly, the premiums would go up dramatically and there would be a new program called “Go 365” which would be an incredibly invasive monitoring of teachers’ health, in which if they didn’t meet certain criteria, or improve on certain metrics, their health costs would actually go up based on wearing a Fitbit-type tracking device.
And so really, it was these two issues in particular, when they were announced in November of last year, enraged, really,m a layer of teachers in West Virginia that already were – as many people know – ranked 48th in country in pay, who were already on the edge of survival. Truly, in the interviews I did with a lot of different teachers, these questions of paying a few hundred more dollars in health insurance would be the difference between being able to continue teaching or having to move out of state.
So, when these proposed governmental reforms to the health insurance came out, there was a lot of anger and really that snowballed over the course of the last few months and culminated in what we saw in the strike.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Eric, you’ve called this West Virginia teachers strike one of the most important labor victories since the early 1970s. What was unique about this strike that has you categorize it as such a critically important labor action?
ERIC BLANC: Right. Unfortunately, there aren’t too many victories since that time that we can choose from; there’s not a huge number of labor strikes that have won. Or labor strikes, period.
But what made this different, I think, you can point to three factors. The first was that it was illegal, and I think that that shouldn’t be under-estimated. Even though the superintendent eventually came on board, the risks taken were incredibly high, particularly at first, when nobody knew what the repercussions would be.
And I think that that fact alone is critically important because so much of the labor movement throughout the United States for the last decade has been hampered by a legal system and a collective bargaining system that sets the union movement up to fail. And so much of the attempts to revive the labor movement have more or less failures or limited at best because they’ve attempted to work within the parameters of the law as such. And I think insofar as West Virginia ignored that and showed that you can have a successful strike despite laws saying that you can’t take that form of action, it really points to a new way forward, I think, for labor generally in the United States. You can take that as a model.
A second point that made it different and historic at that, was that it became a wildcat strike. And for listeners who don’t know, that means it’s a strike that’s doesn’t have the formal approval of the union leadership. And that again, is not something that we have seen very often. We haven’t seen that in a widespread, statewide level since at the least the early 1970s.
So the first day of the strike, a deal was reach between the union leadership and the governor. It was announced that the strike was over. And the membership was told you’re going back to work on Thursday. On the next day, on Wednesday, school after school on the Facebook group that people organized, decided “No, we’re not going back. We can’t trust the governor. These are just promises.”
And it turned out that the wildcat really saved the day, because if they had gone back, the momentum would have been lost and the strike could have been lost.
And I think that the third and most exciting – in some ways – defining feature of the strike that makes it different than so many other labor struggles, successful or not, is that it seems to be spreading across the country. I’m not sure how much everybody’s been following, but there’s major pushes toward similar strike actions in Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, New Jersey and so what you see is it appears to have sparked a nationwide public education movement.
And that strike wave in the public sector and public education is not something we’ve seen. And the extent to which that catches on, remains to be seen. And it very much depends on what people do in the coming weeks and months to make that potential for a strike wave reality.
For more information, visit Eric Blanc’s Jacobin Magazine author’s page.
