I have been incredibly busy lately with what’s been going on with our legislature so I have not had time to post. Though I’d sort of originally planned on this being a blog strictly about my art and my making of art I am going to take a minute to talk about the eminent teacher strike in West Virginia. I am a high school art teacher in the Upper Kanawha valley and this is my fifth year teaching full-time. Since I’ve been a teacher I have had two children first my daughter and my son. My daughter is three years old and my son is almost two. As a full-time, fully certified teacher I have qualified for food stamps and WIC. With both of my children we were on WIC so that we could afford baby formula and fresh produce for children. For four years I have went to both the legislature and to our insurance board to ask for them to fix our insurance. For four years I and everyone else have been ignored and the insurance has progressively gotten worse and worse. Over the previous few years I felt like I was nearly alone in this battle. I would go to these meetings and inform people of what was going on and explain that I believed at the time the strike might be the only thing to fix it. As a young teacher living paycheck to paycheck the idea of a strike was not ideal, so it certainly is and was something that we look to avoid. This year the American Federation of Teachers made public employees insurance the number one legislative focal point. It was clear that the legislature was going to do nothing to fix this problem. A friend of mine who is a member of our local branch of NEA set up on social media a page for public employees to address their grievances publicly. This blew up fairly quickly and I believe in itself was a driving force behind uniting our public employees. They quickly came to the conclusion that a strike would probably be the only action that would change anything. I think it’s also important to address the issue of nihilism in younger people in our society today. This includes myself who is a steadfast pragmatic nihilist. When you raise young people into adulthood in an environment where it is made clear that they have no viable prospects and nothing governing the system but greed and disorder they typically turn to an attitude of absolutism in terms of economic systems. These systems breed an environment where strike is likely For educated working people. This is because they have spent an enormous amount of time and resources in getting an education as they were told to do for jobs that do not exist. If the jobs do exist they are poor quality with little compensation and poor benefits. This is not for some great philosophical reasons but simply because these people have very little lose. Knowing that if they lose their jobs the consequences will not be as dire as there living circumstances with the jobs are less than ideal. The older folks involved see that there truly are no prospects for younger teachers and for themselves the prospect of a retirement where everything they have work for is taken from them for basic healthcare which declines and quality every year. This older group, teachers who have been teaching for 30 or more years, often are in a better financial place but fear for the future. These factors combined caused many of our members, in fact most of our members, to demand a strike vote early on. The leadership I feel was very reluctant at this as they aired on the side of caution. This is for good reason as West Virginia does not allow collective bargaining for its public employees. A strike in West Virginia is against the law for public employees. But again these fears on both sides for both nihilistic younger teachers and for the new retirement older teachers pushed the issue forward. This has been an almost entirely membership driven movement. This makes it pretty comical when we have politicians that claim that the union bosses are the ones pushing this. The reality is that the membership of these unions have been dragging the leadership along with them kicking and screaming. It has been totally membership driven, which is exactly as it should be. The varying levels of organization in each county have created an environment where counties in some cases behave more autonomously than others. Some smaller counties opted to take individual strike votes so that they may walk out on their own without the state. This took place over several days over the past few weeks. During this time nearly every county in the state took an authorization vote for the state level leadership to call for actions such as work stoppages or strike. With this information the past weekend the two major teaching unions in the state the American Federation of Teachers and the West Virginia Educators Association, along with the major service personnel union called for a statewide walk out Thursday and Friday. The demands have been simple and the bar has been set low. All the employees have asked for is dedicated tax revenue to fund the public employee insurance agency. With this they have asked for a reasonably small pay raise given how far below the national average teacher and service personnel pay is in West Virginia. They have also asked that seniority be protected in the event of layoffs at the school level. They also asked that the punitive bills against the unions that have been proposed this session be abandoned. It was in my opinion that they should also ask for collective-bargaining rights. But this bar may be too high. I have had the fortune through much of this to be a member and an executive board member of the American Federation of Teachers in Kanawha County. Though things in general moved a little bit more slowly than I think many of the members would have liked our local here has been fairly well organized in particular with actions such as demonstrations and walk-ins. All of this in the action has been the reason for my lack of participation on the blog and for my current hiatus from my creative endeavors. Hopefully as soon as this matter is resolved I can return to work with little more distraction. We are really fighting to create some meaningful change for public employees. Our teachers and service personnel in West Virginia are currently in a bad state. Pun intended.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Jacob FertigArtist, Educator, Activist, Micronationalist, et al. Archives
November 2019
Categories |