Bring Out Labor’s Power to Shut Portland Public Schools Down – Victory to the Teachers!

The Portland Association of Teachers is on strike for smaller class sizes, safe staffing levels and better pay. What it’s fighting for is crucial for students, their families and the whole working class. As the strike nears its third week, the teachers are up against a school district administration that has pulled out all the stops against them, from “misunderstanding” its own budget to bringing in “reading tutors” to cross the teachers picket lines. The school district admin is going after the teachers with everything it has.

So why should the teachers be expected to fight with both hands tied behind their backs? While holding morning pickets at every school, the teachers union is issuing special passes to school employees being asked to work during the strike. These “allow” workers, from custodians to paraprofessionals, to cross the picket lines – which means helping the school board bosses keep the schools running. Instead, the whole labor movement needs to reaffirm, once and for all, that picket lines mean don’t cross. Rather than getting permission to work behind the picket lines, workers should refuse to cross, and join the pickets along with a mass mobilization of labor to help the teachers win. A defeat for the strike would affect all labor – but a victory here would be a major gain for us all.

The fate of the strike largely depends on teachers, other school employees, workers across the city and students uniting together, shutting the whole school system down – from Portland Public Schools headquarters to the smallest elementary school – and forcing the school district to meet the strikers’ demands. Along with every school district building, all active construction sites connected to PPS need to shut down too. Not a single nail should be driven and not a lick of paint should be applied until the demands of the teachers are met. Workers in the trades and transportation are instrumental in keeping the department of education going. With their help, the teachers can shut it down in order to win.

Rather than a strategy of finding secret money, “allying” with Democratic governor Tina Kotek, or federally appointed mediators from Biden, the same president who called in the power of the federal government to stop an impending strike of railroad workers, teachers need to turn to their real allies: the working class. The same federal government, Democrats and Republicans alike, that arms and funds the savage bombing campaign and occupation raining mass death on the people of Gaza is not and cannot be an “ally” to teachers here at home. And in fact, unchaining workers’ power to stop the flow of arms to that mass murder abroad is connected to unchaining the power of labor here to help the Portland teachers WIN. It’s about time. All out to defend the teachers’ picket lines and win the strike!