By all accounts, the strike is a bottom-up rebellion. It was organized by rank-and-file teachers, with state teachers’ unions scrambling to catch up.
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The Labor Movement Should Follow Their Lead.
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It’s actually illegal for teachers to strike in West Virginia. They’re doing it anyway. Thousands of public school teachers across West Virginia went on strike this week in protest over their pay and benefits, affecting more than 277,000 students.
Teachers and public employees have been demonstrating for weeks, including a massive all-day protest at the Capitol on Friday, asking lawmakers to fully fund the Public Employees Insurance Agency and increase pay.
Saving the land cannot be separated from saving the people, their livelihood, health and the best of their way of life, from the reach of profiteers. The first peoples, the new pioneers of mountain farms, veterans of mining, labor in unions and not, coal-resistance activists have tales that can teach their more modernized would-be helpers. Learn to listen. It will take patience and perseverance to renew coal country, and the rest of the Earth too.
Last week, the Republican-controlled legislature in West Virginia overrode a veto by Democratic Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, making the measure officially law. The story of how West Virginia got to that point is a boiled-down version of the changes America has undergone over the past half-century — the pain of de-industrialization, the shift in political power, the casting about for anything that might create jobs.
The number of deaths is probably greater than the number who perished with the sinking of the Titanic, The passengers on the Titanic included scions of wealthy families — people whose passing was deemed important enough to memorialize in books and movies. By contrast, the five thousand workers at Hawk’s Nest were poor, predominantly Black, and considered expendable in the early years of the Great Depression.
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