One Out, All Out – Picket Lines Mean: Don’t Cross!

The Portland Association of Teachers is on strike, a historic first for employees of Oregon’s largest school district. This struggle is of great importance for all workers – we need to win this one! Demanding better pay, higher staff-to-student ratios and smaller class sizes, the teachers are standing up for us all, for their students, and for the future of public education. Management is refusing to meet key demands – like higher wages to match area standards, and smaller class sizes to help teachers meet students’ basic needs. The strike kicked off on November 1 with pickets and a rally of thousands. Bringing out the power of workers solidarity is key to winning it.

To do so, it’s essential for all labor to be clear on what a strike is all about. It’s about using workers power to bring work to a halt. On strike means shut it down. Shut it down means solidarity in action between all sectors of the workforce – one out, all out. That goes when the strike is at a job site, services (healthcare, for example), transport, industry – or the school system. Today, while the Portland School District goes after the teachers, the classified staff union is also negotiating, with little gain in sight. Maintenance workers will be negotiating with the district soon.

Isn’t it obvious that all sectors should unite together? Yet once again we’re seeing “leaders” tell union members to cross each others’ strike lines. Instead of playing by the bosses’ divide-and-conquer rules, it’s in the urgent interest of all labor sectors to put solidarity into action. For teachers, support staff, paras, clerical, painters, maintenance and all workers, in unity there is strength. To win, we need to reassert the basic labor principle that picket lines mean don’t cross!

Teachers aren’t the only ones on strike right now in Portland. Over a thousand Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers in the pharmacy, imaging and other departments are too, demanding more sustainable staffing levels, as well as 1,300 workers at PeaceHealth in Portland and Southwest Washington who went on a five day strike at the end of October. Other healthcare workers represented by SEIU at Kaiser went on strike in the month of October, and healthcare workers at OHSU got a significant raise after voting to strike. In healthcare as at schools, with “picket lines mean don’t cross” a vital rallying cry, we need to build pickets so big that no one dares cross them, calling in support from the whole of labor to force the employers to meet the strikers’ demands.

Seeking to grind us down one after another, the employers want us all to lose. Democratic mayor “Teargas Ted” Wheeler certainly has their back. In this profit-driven system, school buildings crumble and the healthcare system descends into chaos. Workers are stretched to the breaking point with absurdly low staffing levels and low pay. Democrats vote to cut spending on education and strip retirement benefits from public sector workers. Like the Republicans and all capitalist politicians, they stand for exploitation and racist repression here, and imperialist war abroad. Labor needs to cut free from the bosses’ parties and politicians once and for all. In every strike and struggle, we see how much we need our own class struggle workers party.

Today winning the teachers strike is the cause of all Portland labor. Here as elsewhere, the basic needs of the working-class population are up against a ruling class whose attacks on labor and democratic rights “at home” go together with its war drive abroad. Having used an infamous strike-breaking law against the rail workers last December, Biden and the Democrats ramp up their arming and funding for U.S. imperialist war from Ukraine to Taiwan – and today are part and parcel of the horrific genocidal war on Gaza. Yet from Italy and Belgium comes some welcome news from sectors of labor seeking to bring out the power of workers action to stop the imperialists’ arms shipments – this needs to be carried out in the U.S. and internationally. Is this all connected to winning strikes here in Portland? Damn right it is – to win, workers of the world must unite.

All out to win the Portland teachers strike! On strike means shut it down!