Solidarity With Chicago Teachers
Cincinnati Socialists would like to express the utmost support for, and stand in solidarity with, the Chicago Teachers Union in their remote work action and their demand that classes transition to remote learning until January 14th in response to the surging cases of the CoVID-19 Omicron variant.
Chicago teachers are expected to return to undersized and poorly ventilated classrooms amid overwhelming evidence that CoVID cases are skyrocketing, just as January 3rd recorded over 1,000,000 cases, hitting a seven-day average of 481,147. The city of Chicago has decisively pushed back against teachers’ demands, with Mayor Lori Lightfoot claiming that this is an “illegal work stoppage,” criticizing teachers as they request safer protocols and conditions in the classroom that address the rapid spread. Chicago Public Schools has made clear that they will not pay teachers who don't show up to work in-person, thereby withholding wages, and even locking out teachers and nurses from their online accounts and preventing them from teaching or meeting with students and families for essential services. While Chicago educators are calling for safe school buildings and a continuation of learning, it is Mayor Lightfoot and CPS officials who are putting the safety of students and their learning in jeopardy and threatening the full closures of school services. Lightfoot—and many others—continues to parrot the idea that school buildings are where children are the safest, failing to recognize how that argument itself illuminates and indicts much of the systemic violence in our capitalist system. This is in lockstep with the unending reverberations of a decades-long dismantling of public healthcare, and the claim “children are safest in schools” exposes the many contradictions of capitalism, often billed to the working class as an egalitarian system of equal opportunity, when it is anything but. Teachers should not have to be pigeonholed into a gambit where demanding safety for themselves and their students is also acting against their personal safety in the immediate term. To tout that schools are the safest place for children while actively denying measures that make those institutions safer inherently calls into question the faith of that statement.
This contradiction begs the question: why even say that when you’re denying safety? Because the distortions of reality that capitalism presents make this statement partially true. The refusal of either presidential administration to meaningfully address the continually plunging circumstances, even with requisite knowledge of the virus to begin with, has forced mass death and evictions on the working class by capitalism’s vicious contortions of the economy. These contortions stressed the public education system immediately, which has been slowly drained of funding to where salaries are bottom of the barrel for teachers and substitutes, the latter of whom have sought other opportunities because their wages are not sustainable. Furthermore, the funds to implement any sort of structural changes, like better ventilation, are either appropriated in different directions or simply nonexistent to begin with.
“The staffing shortage,” a rather objectifying phrase, reflects our unwillingness to fund public education, just as the mass death and eviction register our unwillingness to fund public healthcare, all rushing together in the wake of the unfettered pursuit of profit. Capitalism capitalizes off the oppressed, poor, and sick, and it always has. It will construct its own circumstances where school, for many, is disproportionately the safest place for children because it’s their main source of a meal. It’s a parent’s primary option for supervision and education so the parent can work at least eight hours a day (and often more) to keep their family alive, because wages languish while cost of rent, housing, groceries, and literally everything else, is skyrocketing. Piecemeal solutions can’t keep up with the draining, and aren’t even meant to. While capitalism continues to contort the circumstances, you’ll continue to see the erosion of safety and healthcare for teachers and students, which carries on both in the immediate and generational future of all workers. There’s nothing to provide workers with the option to stay at home with their children during CoVID because they’re still forced to work. Because profit still needs to be extracted. These cannibalistic tendencies have been all-consuming since the beginning and will continue in perpetuity.
“Children are the safest in schools” should suggest we have a long way to go and actually entail support of the CTU’s demands. Safety and healthcare should be promised everywhere it possibly can—which includes the workplace. There shouldn’t be such a fragile yet arbitrary system that creates a violent disparity in safety from one area to the next. Workers shouldn’t be threatened with their wages being stopped, as Chicago Public Schools did to the teachers who are demanding safer working conditions. But, in capitalism, these conditions facilitate unending profit, wealth, and power transfer, as capitalism’s manipulative grasp actively gaslights everyone else into believing they’re responsible, and then tells them to act with fewer and fewer resources to do so.
Finally, it should be an existential shame to any government to argue there is an acceptable level of otherwise avoidable child death, as suggested by the “children aren’t vectors” or the lightly refined “children don’t spread as much” talking points—especially when that acceptable level, even with adults, is heavily represented by Black, poor, working class, disabled, and sick communities. At that point, the concentration of acceptable death looks a lot like—and is—genocide.
So, why even say “children are the safest in schools” while actively making them more dangerous? Because capitalism creates the conditions where good intentions are actively suppressed and bad intentions are encouraged. It log-jams any social net-positive because that would come with a concession of power.
We stand in solidarity with the Chicago Teachers Union demands to switch to a temporary district-wide remote learning plan or provide adequate mitigation in school and educational service buildings, including robust and timely testing (with a recent negative PCR test to return in-person, school testing sites and home kits, and weekly testing and surveillance testing), sufficient staffing and substitute teachers, and a shift to remote learning when 20 percent or more of staff are in isolation or quarantine, or when a school safety committee thinks it’s warranted.