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The teachers revolt in West Virginia

Two years ago, The Washington Post ran a long piece about West Virginia called, “How the birthplace of the American labor movement just turned on its unions.” It described how, following the Republican takeover of the Legislature in 2014, the state passed a right-to-work law prohibiting mandatory union dues.

Nevertheless, in a revival of West Virginia’s long-dormant tradition of bold labor activism, teachers and some other school employees in all the state’s 55 counties are refusing to return to work until lawmakers give them a 5 percent raise, and commit to addressing their rapidly rising health insurance premiums.

Observers of the local labor scene didn’t see this coming. “It’s hard to characterize the surprise that many of us felt who have studied the labor movement in this state,” said Ken Fones-Wolf, a labor historian at West Virginia University.

Statewide teacher strikes are extremely rare, and to some in West Virginia, this one feels like a new dawn. “People are starting to get angrier and remember our history, remember our roots,” said Jenny Craig, a middle school special education teacher in Triadelphia. Since the strike began, she’s been spending nearly all her time either picketing at her home school or demonstrating at the state Capitol, a three-hour drive away.

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The obvious impetus for the strike lies in the state’s terrible treatment of its teachers, whose pay ranked 48th in the nation in 2016. In the past, solid health care benefits helped make up for low wages, but because West Virginia hasn’t been putting enough money into the state agency that insures public employees, premiums and co-payments have been increasing significantly.

Craig, who is in her 10th year of teaching, said that because of the cost of insurance, she takes home less money now than she did six or seven years ago. Her husband, who is on her insurance plan, is a diabetic, and she said the monthly charge for his insulin has gone from $25 four years ago to more than $180 today.

Yet if the strike is rooted in the specific conditions and history of West Virginia, it’s also part of a nationwide upsurge in intense civic engagement by women. “As a profession, we’re largely made up of women,” Amanda Howard Garvin, an elementary school art teacher in Morgantown, told me. “There are a bunch of men sitting in an office right now telling us that we don’t deserve anything better.” In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, she said, women across the country are standing up to say: “No. We’re equal here.”

Of course, Trump won West Virginia overwhelmingly, with nearly 68 percent of the vote. Still, Craig described the anti-Trump Women’s March, as well as the explosion of local political organizing that followed it, as a “catalyst” for at least some striking teachers. “You have women now taking leadership roles in unionizing, in standing up, in leading initiatives for fairness and equality and justice for everyone,” she said.

Rebellion, it seems, is contagious. Now teachers in Oklahoma — where in 2016 salaries ranked 49th in the country — are considering their own statewide strike. Kentucky teachers, concerned about changes to their pension plans, could walk out as well.

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Teachers’ strikes are obviously painful for all involved. The West Virginia teachers have been packing lunches for kids who rely on free school meals, but parents have to find alternative child care while schools are closed. (Garvin told me that students won’t miss any educational time, because makeup days will be added to the end of the year.) Almost everyone in the state is desperate for a resolution to the conflict.

It’s not clear when we’ll see one. West Virginia’s governor and House of Delegates have agreed to the 5 percent raise, but Republicans in the state Senate are refusing, and teachers say they won’t accept anything less.

As long as the teachers stay out, they serve as a symbol not just of a renascent labor movement, but of a citizens’ uprising that’s taking different forms throughout the United States. Fones-Wolf thinks the strike goes hand in hand “with a much more generalized discontent. You see evidence of it from these school kids in Florida, who are really quite amazing. Maybe we’re on the cusp of a time when people say, ‘enough.'”

If that’s true — if a spirit of revolt really is sweeping across the country — it will be the one way Trump has helped make America great again.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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MICHELLE GOLDBERG © 2018 The New York Times

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