Why Teachers Strike
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Transcript of Why Teachers Strike
WHY BC TEACHERS STRIKEby Fred Subra, with signi3icant help from David Horsey (and others*)
Calvin & Hobbes, by Bill Watterson
You hate teachers? That might have to do with the fact that all you hear about in the media is how despicable we all are.
If you care to understand where we are coming from, it is pertinent to look at what has happened in the US over the last few decades, because the current BC government has
been pushing us in the same direction. !!!!!!!!!!!!
(After all, the US is the greatest economy in the world, what could possibly go wrong?)
BC curriculum is continually revised to favour job skills over anything else—we are led by people who prefer schools to produce
obedient workers rather than critically-thinking citizens.
Anything you need to do to enrich your intellectual life, you can pay for it yourself.
!!!!!!!!!!!!
But who can afford private Art or Music classes? Not the middle class, if the 1% keep running the show.
BC teachers have opposed FSA tests. That’s because the FSA budget
could be spent to actually help kids.
The business community who manages this province is obsessed with accountability. They believe that a good teacher is someone
who, out of a class of 30 students, should reliably produce 30 reading and counting units—FSA tests are designed to measure just that.
Our masters do not want to know, for instance, how much of our time is spent addressing emotional and mental health issues.
Yet a kid whose parents are divorcing will not often be able to focus on trigonometry. A 16-year-old whose ex-girlfriend is pregnant might
not assimilate the lesson on descriptive paragraph writing. A hungry child cannot memorize multiplication tables. A bullied and/or suicidal teenager will rarely care that
Mrs. Vandertramp is about knowing when to use être instead of avoir. !
FSA tests measure none of those factors, yet they are used to determine which schools are worth investing into.
BC Liberal logic never deems it wise to spend on “bad” teachers’ struggling students, it believes in rewarding success. So basically
money goes to those places where it’s least needed. Therefore BC teachers will continue to oppose FSA tests.
A problem we’ve been having is that negotiating with the BC Liberals looks exactly like this:
!!!!!!!!!!!!
So, every time, teachers are forced to go on strike. If you think that’s fun, you need to think again. Greedy as we are, we lose money every time we do our duty and defend public education.
Of course, taxes pay for teacher salaries, and that makes teachers repulsive.
Feel the same about the army? Let Stephen Harper cut their pensions:
they only risked everything for the rest of us when they put their lives on the line,
believing their families would be taken care of. ( )
Well, guess what? !
Teachers, like soldiers, nurses, mechanics or cooks, do pay taxes.
Like everyone working in BC, we deserve a salary that keeps up with increasing living costs.
Our corporate masters may not be interested in building a fair society.
!!!!!!!!!!!!
Teachers are.
If teachers gain a fair salary increase, it will empower nurses, police of_icers, government workers—the whole working class—to negotiate a fairer share of the pie.
!!!!!!!
!!!!!!
(Not a good thing if you’re a BC Liberal.) !
(A quick word on unions: we’ve all heard horror stories on how evil they can get when they have too much power.
!But please consider this: without unions to bully them
on our behalf, corporations would still exploit children in coal mines and factories.
You think I exaggerate? !
Just look at the facts: wherever they can get away with it, corporations
use sweatshop labour—in many developing countries the work is done by children. )
!
!
Don’t they know that we in the middle and working classes are their best customers?
We simply can’t afford to pay you more in this economy.
We’ll buy those cell phones and pay the crazy fees. !
We’ll buy their cars and trucks, we’ll put their gas in those tanks. (Boy, do they always have a good reason to increase those prices!)
(Notice how the North American middle class is only expected to go from 5.5 to 5.8 trillions? Look at Europe, look at Asia:
the plan is not for things to get any better here.)
HERE IS THE BOTTOM LINE:
Money that goes to the middle class is money that will get reinjected into the economy
and therefore create jobs. !
Anyone with an offshore account is removing wealth from Canada—then they tell us we can’t afford to properly fund public schools.
According to the BC Liberals, we can’t afford to fund a decent public school system for the average BC child. !To be fair, here is the kind of institution where, whether or not they get their tax cuts, their own children are educated :
(This is a view of the independent St. George’s junior school in Vancouver.
Not bad, eh?
I wonder how many of these kids need a breakfast program run and paid for by volunteer teachers, administrators and CUPE workers, like the one we have in my school…
At any rate, I’m con_ident they score very well on FSA tests.)
Here is the awesome: BC “independent” schools are funded, in non-negligible part, with our tax dollars.
“Provincial funding for private schools has risen at a much higher rate than it has for the public system. According to B.C. Teachers' Federation estimates based on Ministry of Education numbers for the 2014 budget,
the public system's funding increased by 16.9% between 2005 and today.
The private system's funding increased by 45.6%.”
Crawford Kilian, BC's Private School Boom, TheTyee.ca
“Teachers revealed their salary demands, asking for an increase comparable to colleagues across Canada and indexed to cost of living. The government said that
would cost over $1 billion.”
!Katie Hyslop,
Updated: Everything You Need to Know about BC Teacher Bargaining,
TheTyee.ca
!“Since the 1970s big tax
cuts at the top have caused after-tax
inequality to rise faster than inequality before
taxes.” !
Paul Krugman, On Inequality Denial,
The New York Times
If these people cared about our country, they would pay their fair share. They earn indecent sums, why shouldn’t
they pay proportionally indecent taxes?
But we are at a point where the famous 1% richest citizens have decided to stop paying for the rest of us—like we weren’t the workers and consumers who made them rich in the Jirst place.
“I hear all this, you know, ‘Well, this is class warfare, this is whatever.’ No. There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. “You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. “Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God
bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
Phot
ogra
ph b
y N
igel
Par
ry fo
r Van
ity F
air
US senator Elizabeth Warren, !
trying to explain why we are NOT advocating for communism,
but for a more balanced capitalism. This is not about eliminating inequality, it’s about keeping our society healthy.
Why stop at $136,270 and $150,000? Billionaires live in this province! If we taxed another (totally random numbers) 1% on people earning 1 to 5 million a year, 2% on people earning 5.1 to 10 million a year, 3% on people earning 10.1 to 30 million a year,
4% on anyone above, THESE GUYS WOULD STILL BE FILTHY RICH,
the difference would change nothing to their lifestyle.
“On his first day in office 12 years ago Premier Gordon Campbell slashed B.C.'s personal income tax rate across the board by 25 per cent. Campbell also reduced the corporate income tax rate and eliminated the corporate capital tax.” !
Doug Ward, BC Liberals' 12 Years of Tax Shifts, Explained, TheTyee.ca
No such thing as a free
tax cut: here are
some of the decisions inspired by the resulting
loss of revenue.
www.
kids
invic
toria
.com
Teachers don’t believe the current movement toward unchecked inequality
is good for our society.
This is what a man who wants to help his country sounds like. That, to me, looks like “leading by example.”
Some interesting people agree with us.
Meanwhile, the BC
Liberals do things like
this, then they tell us we are
unreasonable when we beg for 2 or 3% a year.
!!!!
(Beautiful smiles, though.)
Funny how drastically people’s ideals can shift once they get in power.
Are you old enough to remember this kind of talk?
If we’re going to talk about
accountability, how have the BC Liberals
earned the right to raise their own
salaries?
Historically, Canada has always stood between two social models.
In the last 12 years, we’ve been rapidly shifting toward one extreme—can you guess which one?
Of course, whatever the regime, money has always bought political power.
But Canada and the US have arguably reached a point where government feels more like an oligarchy
(a powerful few always have their way) than like a democracy
(a majority of people feel like the state works on their behalf).
Only a vocal citizenry can reverse that trend.
!“You Teachers keep whining, but the BC liberals were
democratically elected. They are doing what people want, so you need to shut the hell up and take it with a smile.”
Speaking strictly for myself, here is why I can’t do that: ! 1. the government has ILLEGALLY ripped our contracts—the fact that no one cares doesn’t make it peachy, 2. it is a fundamental democratic right to express our views and try to get the citizenry to see our side of the story, 3. the neediest citizens tend not to vote: lack of education, basic belief that no one cares about them so why bother, etc. 4. few people actually want to know what’s going on. Many are just happy to save a few hundred bucks on their taxes, not realizing the cost in lost services (for a lot of folks, a closed or understaffed hospital only matters when unfortunate things happen to people they care about), 5. unfortunate things are happening to people I care about—I work with kids who need extra support, I see colleagues overwhelmed with increasing “special needs” students having to choose every day whether they should slow everyone down or leave those kids behind.
For the record, I love that some people get to be multibillionaires, it gives the rest of us something to dream about.
The G
reat
Gatsb
y, W
arne
r Bro
s Pict
ures
But as a democratic society we have a moral obligation to give our less fortunate citizens the means to improve their lives. !The fact is public education plays a huge part in fostering social justice.
To illustrate my points I have used cartoons by David Horsey, who has chronicled the evolution of American society
for the Seattle Post Intelligencer and the Los Angeles Times, winning two Pulitzer prizes in the process.
!(I hope this man is disgustingly wealthy.)
phot
o by N
ancy
LeV
ine
So here is your assignment: do your own thinking. If you feel the BC government is doing a great job,
congratulations, you get to do nothing. !!!!!!!!!!!!
If you believe they’re doing some damage, please consider using your voice.
P. S. As a parting gift, I would like to share a few eCards, just so you can leave with a smile on your face.
(I’m sure nurses and cops have those days, too. Soldiers? Lawyers? No way we’re the only ones.)
"The legitimate object of
government is to do for a community of people whatever
they need to have done, but can not do at all, or can not so well do, for themselves — in
their separate and individual
capacities."
Addendum: if you are still with me, chances are you’ll be interested in this:
… the problem isn’t that we have inequality. Some inequality is intrinsic to any high-functioning capitalist economy. The problem is that inequality is at historically high levels and getting worse every day. Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.
If we don’t do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when.
The model for us rich guys here should be Henry Ford, who realized that all his autoworkers in Michigan weren’t only cheap labor to be exploited; they were consumers, too. Ford figured that if he raised their wages, to a then-exorbitant $5 a day, they’d be able to afford his Model Ts. What a great idea. My suggestion to you is: Let’s do it all over again. We’ve got to try something. These idiotic trickle-down policies are destroying my customer base. And yours too.
The thing about us businesspeople is that we love our customers rich and our employees poor. So for as long as there has been capitalism, capitalists have said the same thing about any effort to raise wages. We’ve had 75 years of complaints from big business—when the minimum wage was instituted, when women had to be paid equitable amounts, when child labor laws were created. Every time the capitalists said exactly the same thing in the same way: We’re all going to go bankrupt. I’ll have to close. I’ll have to lay everyone off. It hasn’t happened. In fact, the data show that when workers are better treated, business gets better. The naysayers are just wrong.
We rich people have been falsely persuaded by our schooling and the affirmation of society, and have convinced ourselves, that we are the main job creators. It’s simply not true. There can never be enough super-rich Americans to power a great economy. I earn about 1,000 times the median American annually, but I don’t buy thousands of times more stuff. My family purchased three cars over the past few years, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. I bought two pairs of the fancy wool pants I am wearing as I write, what my partner Mike calls my “manager pants.” I guess I could have bought 1,000 pairs. But why would I? Instead, I sock my extra money away in savings, where it doesn’t do the country much good. So forget all that rhetoric about how America is great because of people like you and me and Steve Jobs. You know the truth even if you won’t admit it: If any of us had been born in Somalia or the Congo, all we’d be is some guy standing barefoot next to a dirt road selling fruit. It’s not that Somalia and Congo don’t have good entrepreneurs. It’s just that the best ones are selling their wares off crates by the side of the road because that’s all their customers can afford.
Dear 1%ers, many of our fellow citizens are starting to believe that capitalism itself is the problem. I disagree, and I’m sure you do too. Capitalism, when well managed, is the greatest social technology ever invented to create prosperity in human societies. But capitalism left unchecked tends toward concentration and collapse. It can be managed either to benefit the few in the near term or the many in the long term. The work of democracies is to bend it to the latter. That is why investments in the middle class work. And tax breaks for rich people like us don’t. Balancing the power of workers and billionaires by raising the minimum wage isn’t bad for capitalism. It’s an indispensable tool smart capitalists use to make capitalism stable and sustainable. And no one has a bigger stake in that than zillionaires like us.
*Sourceshttp://thetyee.ca/News/2013/05/06/BC-Liberals-Tax-Shifts/
http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2012/02/27/BC-Tax-Cut-Era/ http://www.the-peak.ca/2014/05/province-shifts-funding-from-liberal-arts-to-trades-training/ http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/should-canadian-millionaires-pay-more-taxes-1.1106636
http://www.ufcw.ca/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3377:inequality-on-the-rise-canadas-richest-canadians-richer-than-ever&catid=83:infographics&Itemid=393&lang=en
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/lifestyle/map-where-canadas-richest-people-live/ http://www.socialworkdegreecenter.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_labour
http://www.kiplinger.com/article/business/T019-C021-S001-middle-class-spenders-will-lead-global-growth.html http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/tx/ndvdls/fq/txrts-eng.html
http://business.financialpost.com/2013/04/03/massive-offshore-tax-haven-account-leak-includes-names-of-450-wealthy-canadians/
http://samuel-warde.com/2014/07/elizabeth-warren-2011-campaign-trail/ http://www.prosebeforehos.com/image-of-the-day/02/07/whats-wrong-with-tax-loopholes-visualized/
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Christy+Clark+boosts+maximum+salaries+aides+cent/8510982/story.html?__federated=1
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2011/08/31/teacher-unemployed-time-to-head-to-wisconsin/ http://www.motifake.com/its-nice-demotivational-posters-49336.html
http://ows.edb.utexas.edu/site/its-more-just-economic-crisis/jimmy-carter-1977-1981-and-ronald-reagan-1981-1989 http://topinfopost.com/2014/06/30/ultra-rich-mans-letter-to-my-fellow-filthy-rich-americans-the-pitchforks-are-
coming
To be continued
F. Subra, June 2014
Think of societies that don’t (didn’t) have decent public schools. Oh, I don’t know... Ancient Egypt? Europe in the 17th century? Most of Africa today? You will observe societies that function pretty well:
rulers rule, workers work, business people make money. Some are filthy rich, most are dirt poor.
What you won’t find, EVER : social justice and freedom. It takes democracies to achieve that. It takes educated people to elect educated leaders who will run the country for the common good
instead of their own personal interests. That is teachers’ contribution to society:
helping people learn to use their brain and, in the long run, Keeping Us All Out Of The Dark Ages.
(Ta-daaa!) So yeah, we take this stuff pretty seriously.