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maeve66So hard to keep up with this, even though it's the weekend.
Day 294: what inspires me?
The Chicago Teachers Union strike has inspired me. I counted, and I know six current Chicago teachers on strike, one of whom USED to be on staff for the union, and another of whom is on staff right now, and an important grassroots leader. She's awesome; I've known her since I was about 12, I think. The strike is crucially important for a few reasons -- first, it's a valiant fight back against Emanuel Rahm, a fervant supporter of No Child Left Behind, of charters, and privatization, and standardized tests, and union busting in the public sector. Second, it is a struggle to overturn what has seemed like an inexorable cultural and legal drift away from democratic public education for all -- New Orleans being one of the school districts furthest along that downward slippery slope. Third, it is a way to continue the battle in Wisconsin for the very existence of collective bargaining rights, which were limited legally in Illinois a year or so ago, to bread and butter issues. Fourth, the leadership and the rank and file membership of the union are absolutely putting a political and community-supported agenda to the forefront of their struggles, demanding smaller class sizes, a return to community control over the school board, a reversal of the trend toward privatized schools that are not available to all, and an expansion of enrichment classes like Art, Music, Foreign Language, etc.
Yes, they are also striking to reverse Rahm's dictatorial elimination of the Cost of Living Adjustment salary increases, and to protect the teacher evaluation process from being linked to student test scores, which cannot be correlated with teacher performance, but derive from many, many other factors. And those are strike demands to support publicly, too. People SHOULD demand reasonable pay and conditions. For the past long period, since outsourcing and deindustrialization, Americans have caved again and again to concessionary contracts until the mere notion of union "rights" and any sense of job security seems exotic and near impossible. We're told by the capitalist class and its general mouthpieces that 'the modern economy' is flexible which means that people should expect to lose jobs and retrain and lose jobs and retrain and remain terrified of the precariousness of their paycheck. People feel so shit about it that they tend to accept that if they don't have job security, or health insurance, or a union fighting for them... then no one should. The strike in Chicago is a chance for us to say NO, that's not true. EVERYBODY deserves a decent job, decent benefits, a decent wage, and workplace rights.
Day 295: things I am looking forward to in the next week and/or month
* watching the last two episodes of Season 2 of Game of Thrones with my sister, my brother-in-law, and my mom (I gave her an intensive tutorial in the-plots-so-far Friday afternoon).
* continuing to add documents and people to my expanding Family Tree on that Mormon site
* watching the Raiders and the Dolphins tomorrow morning -- I hella love football season
* hanging out with my younger niece next weekend (my older niece was here today, helping me scan old photos, partly for the Ancestry.com project, partly just in general)
* going swimming at the Richmond Plunge soon
Day 294: what inspires me?
The Chicago Teachers Union strike has inspired me. I counted, and I know six current Chicago teachers on strike, one of whom USED to be on staff for the union, and another of whom is on staff right now, and an important grassroots leader. She's awesome; I've known her since I was about 12, I think. The strike is crucially important for a few reasons -- first, it's a valiant fight back against Emanuel Rahm, a fervant supporter of No Child Left Behind, of charters, and privatization, and standardized tests, and union busting in the public sector. Second, it is a struggle to overturn what has seemed like an inexorable cultural and legal drift away from democratic public education for all -- New Orleans being one of the school districts furthest along that downward slippery slope. Third, it is a way to continue the battle in Wisconsin for the very existence of collective bargaining rights, which were limited legally in Illinois a year or so ago, to bread and butter issues. Fourth, the leadership and the rank and file membership of the union are absolutely putting a political and community-supported agenda to the forefront of their struggles, demanding smaller class sizes, a return to community control over the school board, a reversal of the trend toward privatized schools that are not available to all, and an expansion of enrichment classes like Art, Music, Foreign Language, etc.
Yes, they are also striking to reverse Rahm's dictatorial elimination of the Cost of Living Adjustment salary increases, and to protect the teacher evaluation process from being linked to student test scores, which cannot be correlated with teacher performance, but derive from many, many other factors. And those are strike demands to support publicly, too. People SHOULD demand reasonable pay and conditions. For the past long period, since outsourcing and deindustrialization, Americans have caved again and again to concessionary contracts until the mere notion of union "rights" and any sense of job security seems exotic and near impossible. We're told by the capitalist class and its general mouthpieces that 'the modern economy' is flexible which means that people should expect to lose jobs and retrain and lose jobs and retrain and remain terrified of the precariousness of their paycheck. People feel so shit about it that they tend to accept that if they don't have job security, or health insurance, or a union fighting for them... then no one should. The strike in Chicago is a chance for us to say NO, that's not true. EVERYBODY deserves a decent job, decent benefits, a decent wage, and workplace rights.
Day 295: things I am looking forward to in the next week and/or month
* watching the last two episodes of Season 2 of Game of Thrones with my sister, my brother-in-law, and my mom (I gave her an intensive tutorial in the-plots-so-far Friday afternoon).
* continuing to add documents and people to my expanding Family Tree on that Mormon site
* watching the Raiders and the Dolphins tomorrow morning -- I hella love football season
* hanging out with my younger niece next weekend (my older niece was here today, helping me scan old photos, partly for the Ancestry.com project, partly just in general)
* going swimming at the Richmond Plunge soon