The national conventions of the American teachers unions were held without a plan to fight the escalating destruction of public education, mass school closures, or mounting layoffs. Instead, the events were handed over to the Democratic Party.
The cuts are the outcome of the four-year contract that the Chicago Teachers Union leadership and Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson imposed on teachers in April 2025.
The nationwide wave of closures is not the sum of isolated local decisions. It is the restructuring of public education in the interests of the financial oligarchy that declares neighborhood schools unaffordable while submitting a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget.
“The lack of resources is making staff leave and the wages are not enough. That is the situation for a lot of us. To survive I have a second job.”
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We are building a network of rank-and-file educators, students, parents, and workers to stop the spread of COVID-19 and save lives.
Postal workers at Royal Mail in Britain have added their voices to the growing international condemnation of the public death threat made against Will Lehman, a Mack Trucks worker and candidate in the United Auto Workers presidential election, by a senior UAW official.
“When I saw the picture posted it made me feel sick to my stomach. It shows that the UAW leadership are scared of Will. Why else would you threaten him and try to intimidate him?”
The conditions we’re fighting against are not unique to our plant. Manufacturing and industrial workers across North America confront the same onslaught on their conditions, pay and jobs.
The continued attempts by the AEU bureaucracy to force through a sellout, and the mass opposition of educators, underscores the crucial importance of the new rank-and-file committee aimed at organising teachers and staff independently.
All over the world the trade unions, including those which were founded through bitter struggles led by socialist-minded workers, now play the leading role in enforcing the dictates of management.
In this lecture, delivered in Sydney, Australia in January, 1998, WSWS international editorial board chairman David North explains this profound transformation through an historical examination of the trade unions themselves.
The Soviet literacy campaign remains the largest and most successful in world history. It serves as an enduring demonstration of the extraordinary possibilities for reorganizing society in the interests of the working class on a planned, socialist basis.
This two-part article is a critique of the Democratic Socialists of America’s narrative of the teachers strike wave in 2018-19. It reviews the role of the teachers unions from West Virginia to Arizona, exposing the claims of “victory” by the unions and the DSA. It also assesses the DSA’s opportunistic “dirty break” with the Democratic Party and their role in collaborating with the unions to divert teachers by pressuring the powers-that-be.
This article reviews the significance of the Janus vs. AFSCME Supreme Court case. As an AFSCME’s lawyer warned the ruling elites during oral arguments, the collection of “agency fees” is routinely traded for a no-strike clause in union contracts. He warned, “Should those clauses disappear, employers will have chaos and discord on their hands.”
In line with the identity politics promoted by the Democratic Party and the pseudo-left, “abolitionist teaching” foments divisions among teachers and students based on race.
The origin of the term ethnomathematics is attributed to Brazilian postmodernist Ubiratan D’Ambrosio (1932-). It emphasizes “power relationships” and cultural relativism, downplaying “objective knowledge.”
After Trump provocatively called educators “loser teachers preaching socialism,” the AFT made no comment. Far from defending teachers against red-baiting, union president Randi Weingarten (annual salary above $500,000) agrees that “socialist” teachers have no business in the classroom. This report looks at some of the long and ugly history of the union’s anticommunism.
