In a Time of Disparity a Teacher Reflects on community and an encompassing union
By Heath Madom
“are you willing to fight for [someone] who you don’t even know as much as you’re willing to fight for yourself?” Bernie Sanders
1.
A few months ago, one of my former students F, who is now a Senior, came by my classroom before school to ask for help in deciphering some legal documents that had been served on his family. Their landlord, it seems, is trying to evict them because their apartment, if renovated and put back on the market, could be leased out to new tenants for triple the current rent. Over the course of that morning, and many others since, I’ve been doing what little I can to support F through what can only be described as a deeply traumatizing experience: Referring him to legal and housing resources, talking him through his anxiety and panic attacks, letting him just sit in my room and cry. After he exits my room and goes off to class, trying to pretend like he cares about his schoolwork when his family might, at any moment, end up out on the street, I often feel like hurling a chair through my classroom windows.
2.
The homelessness crisis in Oakland and beyond just seems to be getting worse and worse. Tent cities have become so common they’re now a normalized part of the landscape. I drive past one every day on my way to school, and it seems to grow larger and larger with each passing week. The injustice of people living in such brute poverty amidst the staggering wealth of the Bay Area fills my chest with an anger I can’t quite fully describe. Still, all I can do as I cruise by in my car is clench my jaw and tighten my fingers around the steering wheel.
3.
In the months and weeks leading up to the Oakland teachers strike, I would often ask myself how we might make the dual crises of homelessness and housing affordability part of our campaign, how we might transform our struggle for better schools into something bigger, something that encompassed everything that should be done to make our society decent and just and right. Whenever I looked through my car window at the homeless encampment’s rows of tents near the high school where I teach, the logic of uniting their struggle with our struggle made perfect sense. Yet when it came to the question of how to actually make that happen, the logic grew murky. I just couldn’t imagine how it would work. I was familiar with the concept of Bargaining for the Common Good from my time working in organized labor; but upon any amount of sustained reflection, the idea of teachers making demands around affordable housing struck me as, at best, a flight of fancy. Because even if we could solve the difficulty of adding in new bargaining demands at the eleventh hour, demands for which we had laid no groundwork, we still faced the problem that everyone was already at capacity trying to prepare for the strike. Getting our own house in order meant we didn’t have the time or energy to advocate for our brothers and sisters living on the streets. As the strike drew nearer and the logistics of preparing for it took up more and more of my own bandwidth, the idea of making affordable housing part of our platform of demands receded from my mind.
Fast forward a few months: the Oakland strike is over, but news spreads that Chicago Teachers are preparing to strike. I read an article from In These Times and am astounded to learn (though not really surprised) that CTU, ever in the vanguard, has done the very thing I had merely daydreamed about: they made affordable housing a major demand of their contract campaign. From a historical perspective, it was not groundbreaking. As Rebecca Burns notes in her subsequent article about the aftermath of the CTU strike, unions have a long history of fighting for laws and policies that benefit the entire working class. It’s why phrases like “Unions, the folks who brought you the weekend” exist in the public consciousness. In the modern era, however, such visionary leadership has been rare. CTU’s extraordinary push for rent control and affordable housing has opened the door to a more ambitious agenda for us all as we move forward.
4.
On Saturday, October 19th, Bernie Sanders was endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a mass rally in Queens, NY. He ended his speech to the 26,000 attendees by asking “are you willing to fight for who you don’t even know as much as you’re willing to fight for yourself?” It was an inspired and inspiring moment that brilliantly framed the question of solidarity in personal terms. In light of Bernie’s speech, an analogous question we could—and should—pose to unions is: are we willing to fight for everyone in our class just as much as we’re willing to fight for our members? If the answer is yes (and I hope it is), then we have to be willing to risk fighting for things that are not directly connected to our working conditions.
Fighting for affordable housing and rent control in Oakland will not be easy. Teachers don’t bargain directly with the Mayor or the City, like they do in Chicago, and the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act of 1995 blocks local jurisdictions in California from passing rent control ordinances. But as the Chicago experience once again demonstrates, it’s not always about winning in the short term. While CTU did not make tangible gains on affordable housing and rent control more broadly (the major gain on this front appears to be a commitment from Chicago to hire more counselors to address the needs of homeless students) they were able to shift the conversation and lay the groundwork for broader change on housing affordability in the future. All because they had the courage to dispense with the traditional approach to bargaining and instead do what they believed was necessary and right.
We can do the same here in Oakland, where the housing crisis is just as dire and also at the top of people’s minds. As public school educators who witness the damage wrought by the housing crisis every single day, we owe it to ourselves to do so. We also owe it to the casualties of the system who are forced to sleep in tents just blocks from newly constructed luxury condominiums. And most of all, we owe it to our students, people like F, who cannot be expected to learn, let alone flourish in the long term, if they don’t have a stable place to live.
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